Appendix a Eighteenth-Century Items in Beckett's Library at His Death

Appendix A Eighteenth-Century Items in Beckett’s Library at His Death

Note: I am grateful to Samuel Beckett’s nephew, Edward Beckett, for his efforts in identifying these volumes. In his letter of 16 September 1992, Mr. Beckett reminded me: “You must understand that my uncle disposed of a lot of books throughout his life, especially towards the latter part of it. Nevertheless I imagine that he kept the ones that meant the most to him.” Only one of these volumes is signed and dated; although we cannot be sure when Beckett purchased the others, I have speculated below when there is evidence arguing for a particular date.

Berkeley, George. A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings, ed. A. D. Lindsay. (1910; London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926). In addition to A New Theory, contains A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. It is not surprising to find this volume in Beckett’s library, given his allusions to Berkeley’s philosophy, from Murphy (written 1934–36) to the headnote to his film called Film (written 1963). Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, ed. G. A. Johnston (London: Faber, 1930). Probably purchased in the early 1930s; in a 23 December 1932 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett says that his friend Joseph Hone recommended the book to him and that he has been reading it. Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” including Boswell’s “Journal of a Tour to the Heb- rides” and Johnson’s “Diary of a Journey to North Wales,” ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1887). Although Beckett read Boswell’s Life in the mid-1930s, James Knowlson (20 May 1994 letter to author) has assured me that he has evidence that these particular volumes were purchased in March 1961 in a Brighton bookshop. Clifford, James L. Young Samuel Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955). Gray, Thomas. Poems and Letters (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1922). Gray is echoed in Happy Days (1961), although Beckett may have purchased this book many years before, perhaps as early as the 1930s, when he was reading so much eighteenth-century literature. Hibbert, Christopher. The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (London: Longmans, 1971). This volume and the next show the persistence of Beckett’s interest in Johnson for more than 30 years after he abandoned a play on Johnson’s last years. See Thrale below. Johnson, Samuel. The Complete English Poems. ed. J. D. Fleeman (Harmond- sworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971). Beckett earlier had undoubtedly owned another edition of his poems; in 1936–37 he began a play about Johnson’s last years, titled (after the famous poem) Human Wishes. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language....To which is prefixed a history of the language, and an English grammar, 2 vols. 8th edn, corr. and

165 166 Appendix A

rev. (London: J. Johnson, 1799). In a letter to me of 30 September 1986, Ruby Cohn said that Beckett told her that he must have purchased the Dictionary in Dublin, probably in the 1930s. In his letter to me of 16 September 1992, Edward Beckett said that he has reason to believe his uncle bought the volume at Greene’s, a bookshop opposite his father’s surveying office on Clare Street; interestingly, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) there is a reference to “Green’s bloody library.” It may be that Beckett purchased other older volumes as well at this bookshop. Cf. Sterne below. Johnson, Samuel. Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. Vol. 1 of The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Since Beckett refers to the Annals, Prayers, and Meditations in his 1936–37 Johnson notebooks, as well as in letters of the same period to Thomas MacGreevy and Mary Manning, then he surely read them at this time in their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions. Presumably, this is the book Mary Manning Howe sent him in the late 1950s and for which he thanks her in a letter dated 2 January 1959: “I read the Johnson book with great relish. . . . ” Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. (1897; reprinted London: Constable and Co., 1966). Among other things, this volume includes Mrs. Thrale’s Anecdotes (cf. Thrale below), which Beckett had read in 1936–37, in preparation for writing Human Wishes. As with the above item, he either owned the 1897 edition and later gave it away, or simply read Hill’s edition in the National Library in Dublin. But his interest in Johnson persisted, as is clear as well from several of the following items. Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Set Forth with an Introduction, ed. Walter Raleigh (1908; London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Lynd, Robert. Dr. Johnson and Company, (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1946). The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, with life of the author ...(Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1881). 6 engravings. Volume signed and dated inside front cover: “Samuel Beckett 3/36.” In a letter dated 23 March 1936 Beckett informed Thomas MacGreevy that he was reading Pope, surely in this edition; Beckett also quotes from Pope’s Pastorals and The Dunciad in his Whoroscope notebook (1932–38). Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism, ed. John Sargeaunt (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1909). Since this work was on the course of study for Trinity College Honors students in the Hilary term 1925, it is likely that Beckett purchased this second-hand volume at this time. Cf. Swift, The Drapier’s Letters, below. The Works of Laurence Sterne. 5th edn, 7 vols. (1779; Dublin: D. Chamberlaine, 1780). Beckett owned Volume 4 of this “First, or Dublin, Collected Edition,” which he may well have purchased in a Dublin bookshop, perhaps Greene’s (see Johnson, Dictionary, above). Vol. 4 contains A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne’s Letters to his Friends. This was the oldest eighteenth-century book owned by Beckett at his death, earlier even than his edition of Johnson’s Dictionary; together, Beckett’s purchase of the two books, and his retention of them, suggests that there was an element of the antiquarian in his eighteenth-century interests. Like the next item, was this purchased in 1938? The Works of Laurence Sterne (London: Oxford University Press, 1910). This was a single-volume edition in The World’s Classics series published first in 1903 Appendix A 167

and reprinted in 1905 and again in 1910. Given the question regarding the potential influence of Tristram Shandy on Beckett, it is significant that he owned a copy at the time of his death. He probably purchased it shortly before 5 August 1938 (he was in Dublin from mid-July to the end of August), when he reported in a letter to MacGreevy that he had been reading Tristram Shandy. Cf. above comment on The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Swift, Jonathan. The Drapier’s Letters, Vol. 6 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. Temple Scott. Bohn’s Standard Library (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1922). As is the case with Pope’s Essay on Criticism (cf. entry immediately above), this work appeared in the course of study for Trinity Honors students in Hilary 1925, and thus it would seem that in this year Beckett splurged on this recent edition. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. The World’s Classics Series. John Hayward (1955; London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Of course Beckett had read this book many years before, and at one time must have owned an earlier edition. In 1976 an acquaintance of Beckett’s reported that the author had admitted a year earlier that he was rereading Gulliver’s Travels, undoubtedly in this edition: see E. M. Cioran in Partisan Review 41(4) (1974); reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Laurence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 325. Thrale, Hester Lynch. Dr. Johnson: “The Anecdotes” of Mrs. Piozzi in their Original Form, ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984). From his extensive notes in the Johnson notebooks, we know that Beckett read this book in 1936–37, probably in Hill’s edition of the Johnson Miscellanies (see above); nonetheless, his purchase of this book as late as the mid-1980s demonstrates his lifelong interest in Johnson. The volume was the most recent eighteenth-century item in Beckett’s library at his death. Vulliamy, C. E. Mrs. Thrale of Streatham: Her Place in the Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson and in the Society of Her Time . . . (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). Since there are extensive notes from this book in Beckett’s Johnson notebooks from 1936–37, and since it contains a chapter on “Dr. Johnson in Love” (a primary focus of his projected play Human Wishes), we can probably assume that this volume was purchased near to its date of publication. Appendix B Trinity Course of Study for English Honors

The course of study for students competing for Honors in English during Beck- ett’s junior freshman and senior freshman years at Trinity College is given in the 1923–24 Calendar. These are the requirements under which he would have entered. As explained in Chapter 1, students were also expected to read assigned sections of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, and were assigned particular literary periods from a history such as Wyatt and Low’s Textbook of English Literature. Specific works appointed were as follows. (For each term I have listed the results of Beckett’s English Honors Examination.)

1924 Hilary: More, Utopia; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I; and Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V. *FIRST HONORS* 1924 Trinity: Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus; and Bacon, Essays. *FIRST HONORS* 1924 Michaelmas: Spenser, Colin Clouts Come Home Again; Sidney, Apology for Poetry; Shakespeare, As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and Milton, “Lycidas” and Comus. *SECOND HONORS* 1925 Hilary: Chaucer, “Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice and The Tempest; and Milton, “Aereopagitica” and Paradise Lost, Books I and II. *SECOND HONORS* 1925 Trinity: Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, Squire’s Tale, and Nun’s Priest’s Tale; Shake- speare, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet; and Addison, Coverley papers and critical essays from The Spectator. *PASS, NO HONORS* 1925 Michaelmas: Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale, Prioress’ Tale, Tale of Sir Thopas, and “Prologue” to The Legend of Good Women; Shakespeare, Macbeth and Hamlet; Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel; Pope, Rape of the Lock and Essay on Criticism; and Swift, The Drapier’s Letters. *FIRST HONORS*

The syllabus defines the conservative canon of British literature as viewed by the faculty of Trinity (and most other faculties) in the mid-1920s. What is missing is not so surprising: Beowulf and all other Anglo-Saxon poems; medieval writers other than Chaucer; Renaissance dramatists other than Shakespeare; and the Metaphysical poets. Note that students who continued in Honors English (as Beckett did not) would have studied the late eighteenth-century writers, the Romantic poets, and the major Victorians.

168 Appendix C Beckett’s Reading of British Literature, 1932–38

Note: Although the following lists do not pretend to completeness, they do give us some sense of the breadth of Beckett’s reading in British literature, as well as his special interest in eighteenth-century writers. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of this material as well as an attempt to weigh the preponderance of British writers relative to non-British writers. Note also that what is not reflected here is the year and a half that Beckett spent researching Dr. Johnson; for a consideration of this matter, see Chapter 5. The following authors are cited (and in most cases quoted) in the Whoroscope notebook (1932–38):

Chaucer Berkeley Greene Farquhar Peele Swift Nashe Pope Dekker Gay Marston Fielding Shakespeare Smollett Bacon Sheridan Burton Johnson Bunyan Thrale-Piozzi Walton Boswell Pepys Thackeray Milton

The following authors are mentioned (sometimes pejoratively), as writers he is reading, in Beckett’s correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy (1930–38):

Anon, Everyman Boswell A. Huxley Jonson Chesterfield Macaulay Donne Goldsmith H. C. Anderson J. Taylor Austen Shaw Berkeley Keats T. S. Eliot Swift Darwin D. Barnes Pope Thackeray W. Lewis Fielding Ruskin Joyce Sterne Kipling Pound Johnson

169 Appendix D Allusions to English Literature in Beckett’s Early Fiction

Note: Although these lists do not claim to to be exhaustive, they nonetheless include most of Beckett’s allusions, either directly to the author by name, to one of his or her works or characters, or in some other unambiguous way. I discuss these and other – sometimes more questionable – references in Chapter 1. Because I believe the information may be relevant, even in a gross tabulation such as this, I have noted which authors are mentioned more than once.

The following authors are referred to in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932, published 1992):

Chaucer (3) Blake Marlowe Wordsworth Shakespeare (2) Byron Swift (3) Dickens (3) Austen

The following authors are referred to in More Pricks Than Kicks (written 1932–34, published 1934):

Chaucer (2) T. Moore (2) Julian of Norwich Donne Shakespeare Wordsworth (passim) Donne Coleridge Milton Byron (2) Swift (9) T. H. Lister Defoe (2) Hardy Fielding (2) Yeats

The following authors are referred to in Murphy (written 1934–36, published 1938):

Shakespeare Coleridge Berkeley (3) Keats Swift (2) P. B. Shelley Pope (passim) M. Shelley E. Young T. Moore Boswell Darwin Chesterfield Russell (A.E.) Wordsworth (2) Lawrence

170 Notes

Introduction

1. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: the Major Authors, 5th edn, ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (1962; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987), p. 2537. 2. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 17. 3. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 7; A Map of Misreading, p. 77. See also Bloom’s more recent Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982). 4. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcist,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (1985); reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 429. The same tone is assumed by Melvin J. Friedman, “Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce and Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: a Biography: the Triumphs and Trials of Literary Biography,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewin- ski (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 15: “This should give the influence-hunters – and there are many among the Beckettians – another tempting lead in the tracking down of Beckett’s seemingly endless inspir- ations and sources.” 5. Joyce’s Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, and Joyce (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), in the Preface and elsewhere. Warner’s title alludes to Stephen Dedalus’s theory, developed in the library scene of Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 205, that Shakespeare “was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grand- father, the father of his unborn grandson.” 6. MLN 103 (December 1988): 1031–55; reprinted in Telling New Lies: Seven Essays in Fiction, Past and Present (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), along with several other essays juxtaposing eighteenth-century and modern fiction. 7. A. A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: a Study of the Origins of Berkeley’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 7. Malebranche is referred to in How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 30. I explore Berkeley’s influence on Beck- ett in “Beckett and Berkeley: a Reconsideration,” in Beckett Versus Beckett, Vol. 7 of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amster- dam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 331–47. 8. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 130; cf. Beckett’s reference in Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 62. In the next sentence I refer to the opinion of S. E. Gontarski, who cites this as an allusion to Vico in his essay “Molloy and the Reiterated Novel,” in As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday (Lon- don: John Calder, 1986), p. 57.

171 172 Notes

9. The best summary of the philosophical background to Beckett is P. J. Murphy, “Beckett and the Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 222–40; the best survey of Beckett’s literary background remains Chap- ter 6 of Pilling’s own Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 132–58. 10. For example, see Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 75–6: “We have the peculiar case here of an Anglo-Irishman who, like Swift, seems to fit comfortably into the Gaelic tradition yet has almost no conscious awareness of what that tradition is.” For a study closer in spirit to my own (although it focuses on Waiting for Godot), see Per Nykrog, “In the Ruins of the Past: Reading Beckett Intertext- ually,” Comparative Literature 36(4) (Fall 1984): 289–311. 11. Samuel Beckett, p. 5. 12. Review in Listener (4 July 1934): 42; reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 42. 13. “The Point is Irrelevance,” Nation (14 April 1956): 325. 14. William York Tindall, Samuel Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 37. 15. Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study, revised edition (1961; Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1968), p. 62; Tindall, p. 16; Fletcher, Samuel Beck- ett’s Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 84; Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 141; and Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Samuel Beckett (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p. 1. 16. On the contents of this notebook, see John Pilling, “From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), pp. 1–20. On the parameters of its use, see my own “Dating the Whoroscope Note- book,” Journal of Beckett Studies 3(1) (Autumn 1993): 65–691; and, for a revision of my suggested terminal date, Geert Lernout, “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett,” In Principle, Beckett is Joyce, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994), p. 26. 17. “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” (1932), reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 80. Cf. Orlando: a Bio- graphy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), p. 298: “There was something definite and distinct about the [modern] age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation.” 18. “What is Modern about the Eighteenth Century?”, in Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture: The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), p. 92. 19. I rely here on Beverly Ann Schlack, who in Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Uni- versity Press, 1979), pp. 289–311, lists literary allusions in The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves (pp. 134–53). My char- acterization of Orlando in the next sentence is likewise drawn from Schlack (p. xi). 20. See Orlando, pp. 208–14 and pp. 222–3, and note also the following from Woolf’s preface: “No one can read or write without being perpetually in the Notes 173

debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, DeQuincey, and Walter Pater – to name the first that come to mind” (p. vii). 21. Cf. P. J. Murphy, who in “Beckett and the Philosophers,” p. 228, notes that the writer was “always fascinated by the lives of philosophers in relation to their theories.” 22. Reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 3, pp. 132–46. 23. Orlando, p. 222. 24. Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 19. See Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), pp. 34ff., plus Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” revised edn (1980; Balti- more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 19. And see A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1925; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 9. 25. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 48; Tale, p. 179. Cf. Dream, p. 201: “the sands of poets and politicians.” 26. “Quotations of the precise words of Swift’s works,” says James S. Atherton, “are not common in Finnegans Wake.” The Books at the Wake: a Study of Literary Allusion in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (1959; Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1979), p. 121. 27. See Gulliver’s Travels: “I . . . discharged my Body of that uneasy Load. But this was the only Time I was ever guilty of so uncleanly an action . . . ” (p. 29); “He had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put in Vials hermetically sealed . . . ” (p. 179). The latter of these citations occurs in Dream in less complete form: “‘We go through the world’ said the Alba ‘like sunbeams through cracks’” (p. 224). 28. Joyce puns here on Vanessa’s unusual family name, here making it sound like Grildrig, the Brobdinagians’ name for Gulliver. 29. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. 2, p. 270. Swift’s emphasis. 30. That Samuel Beckett is referred to in this passage has been denied by Carey and Jewinski in their “Introduction” to Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, pp. xvi–xvii, and also, more recently, by Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 106. When Joyce originally wrote this, they say, he had not yet met Beckett. Nonetheless, whatever his inten- tion when composing this passage, he may later have sensed its relevance to his young Irish friend; he did not delete it. 31. “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot),” in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 3, ed. Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), p. 50. See Schneider, Voleurs de mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 38. 32. Schlack makes just such a division in Continuing Presences, where she mentions the “fatal blurring of the distinction between influence upon and allusion to” (p. x). 33. A Room of One’s Own (1929; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 117. In this matter I take a somewhat different position from S. E. Gontarski, who in The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), argues that Beckett typically begins with something personal or historical, but in the process of revision manages to make his subject applicable to humanity at large. 174 Notes

34. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 3 and 8. 35. John Traugott, “The Professor as Nibelung,” ECS 3(4) (1970): 532–43, was the first critic I know who referred to Swift as our “contemporary.” How- ever, many years before, Beckett seems to have looked upon him as his contemporary.

1 Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century

1. Proust (1931; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 62. 2. See Marjorie Perloff, “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univer- sity Press, 1987), p. 36: “English, for Beckett, is, after all, the language of his childhood, more specifically, the language of English literature as taught to a schoolboy at the Portora Royal School in the Northern Ireland of the early 1920s. Such a schoolboy would of course have been subjected to a heavy dose of Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry, of Milton, and, more immediately, of the great Romantic and Victorian poets.” Oddly, Perloff skips over the eighteenth century. 3. John Calder, Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, 30 December 1990; used with permission. Cf. Proust, p. 17: “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” In a letter to me in May 1993, James Knowlson questions the first half of Calder’s observation; yet Calder is correct in a relative sense, for it is clear that at no later time in his life did Beckett read with either the intensity or range that he did during the late 1920s and 1930s. 4. The Dublin University Calendars for 1924–25 and 1925–26 list the names of students in Beckett’s class for 1923–24 and 1924–25; the exact numbers are 208 students in his class during his first year and 192 during his second. 5. Samuel Beckett, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harlow, England: Longman Group: 1974), p. 3. On this period of Beckett’s life, see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), Chap- ter 5: “The Paris Years, 1928–30.” 6. I am grateful to Professor James Mays of York University for his suggestions on how such information can be gleaned; coming in the early stages of my research, his advice was invaluable to me. 7. “From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: Beckett Inter- national Foundation, 1992), p. 10. 8. Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 38. 9. Regarding TCD’s long reliance on examinations, see R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 1592–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1982), pp. 115–17 and 122–3. Students in Beckett’s day were permitted to pass by lectures (attendance at 5/6 of the total was required) or by examination; since his examination results are available, we may assume Notes 175

Beckett elected to follow the second of these routes, except perhaps in the 1925 Trinity term. Examples of the views of American scholars are those of Bair, who indicates that Beckett’s tutor was concerned that he was “cutting classes excessively” (p. 37); and Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), who speaks of Beckett’s concentration on modern languages as a “major” (p. 10). 10. Beckett Archives, Reading University MS 1227/1/2/15. On the self-satisfied atmosphere at Trinity during the period between 1924 and 1939, see McDowell and Webb, pp. 444ff. 11. Although Bair says that this exam was “required only of students whose ability to do college work was questionable” (p. 37), McDowell and Webb report that until 1952 the standard mode of entrance for all students was by passing an examination (p. 11). Held in mid-October, the examination was open to students who had entered within the past 12 months. 12. The copy I perused at Trinity was The History of English Literature, 13th edn. (London: Murray’s Student’s Manuals, 1901). 13. Specifically, students were directed to use “Short Specimens” or “Smaller Specimens,” both based on T. B. Shaw’s Student’s Specimens of English Litera- ture. The copy I perused at Trinity was the Smaller Specimens of English Litera- ture, “New ed.” (1875; London: John Murray, 1907). 14. David Gullette, “Mon Jour Chez Sam: a Visit With Beckett,” in Ploughshares, 1(2) (1972): 69. 15. In Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), pp. 119–20. See Chapter 3 below. Beckett tells MacGreevy on 5 October 1938 that he has been reading Tristram Shandy. 16. From TCD’s Annual Records of Terms and Examinations (detailed series), MUN Vol. 23/No. 82. 17. Beckett refers to Ossian in a 1934 review of recent Irish poetry. See Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 70. 18. Luce’s comment, made to Bair (p. 38) in the early 1970s, is as follows: “It wasn’t until he was twenty and in his third year that he blossomed. He even took a second in his French examination and that is most thoroughly undistinguished. It’s amusing now to think of it.” 19. Although he received a Second Honors in English, Beckett was second in his class; there was only one First Honors awarded. 20. For a description of the “Premium,” see McDowell and Webb, p. 126. Luce’s 1970 letter to Knowlson (see note 10 above) oddly skips over this term, and Beckett’s name does not appear in the 1925–26 Calendar as one receiving Honors. It may be that he passed on the basis of attending lectures (see note 9 above), or perhaps sat for the Ordinary Examinations. 21. This information comes from the 1925–26 and 1926–27 Calendars; the award in French can be found also in “Captain Shaw’s List of Students with Distinctions, 1924–31,” a privately maintained account by an alumnus of TCD (MUN/Vol/43/12). In his letter to Knowlson, Luce called this final freshman examination “a tough exam in those days, including Latin and general subjects,” and it is thus significant that on the basis of his examination, Beckett was awarded a Senior Exhibition of £20 for two years. For an explanation of the “Little-Go,” see McDowell and Webb, pp. 446–8. 176 Notes

22. See the following from the 1923–24 Calendar: students were told that of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, “all candidates must present themselves in two, and two only, of the five Sections named above.” 23. The slightly more recent edition which I perused at Trinity (the only one now available at the library) is The Intermediate Textbook of English Literature, ed. A. J. Wyatt and A. S. Collins, 4th edn (London: University Tutorial Press, 1930). The Calendar says “as in Wyatt and Low’s. . . . ” It would seem that students were free to choose Wyatt and Low or another history, such as Henry S. Pancoast’s Introduction to English Literature (recommended to incoming students), or Alexander H. Thompson’s History of English Litera- ture (required for the 1923 Junior Exhibition), or Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (required for those taking the 1924 Ordinary Examinations). Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 762, notes that Beckett at his death still owned the first volume of the two-volume Wyatt and Low (inscribed “Michaelmas Term, 1923”), as well as a copy of Thomp- son’s History (dated February 1923). 24. One example shall have to suffice: students sitting for Ordinary Exam- inations during Beckett’s first two years at Trinity were responsible for four Shakespearean plays; students sitting for Honors Examinations in English were responsible for twelve plays. 25. Since the questions themselves are labeled, it is possible to say with assur- ance that all questions for Honors English Examinations during Beckett’s first two years at Trinity were authored by Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages, and Wilbraham F. Trench, Professor of English Literature. 26. For example, style questions include those on the evolution of the decasyl- lable from Chaucer to Shakespeare, differences in the blank verse of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and Milton’s style in “Aeropagitica”; genre questions include those on humor and satire in Utopia, Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again as “idealized autobiography,” and the epic quality of Shake- speare’s Henry V. 27. Bair, pp. 38–40. 28. From Notebook 1, p. 61, now at the Harry K. Ransom Center, The Univer- sity of Texas; the cancelled reference to British writers occurs on p. 67. Used with permission. That Beckett is alluding to his TCD years rather than his subsequent reading is suggested by his reference to “the first period accorded to James” and also by his allusion on the latter page to his “course of study” – the very terminology employed at Trinity. 29. Bair, p. 52; see also pp. 91 and 102. 30. See Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), referring to Byron (p. 220), Wordsworth (p. 185), and Dickens (p. 95). 31. Beckett owned a copy of this edition at his death. See Appendix A. 32. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 649 n.120. 33. This emphasis shows up immediately in Beckett’s writing, for whereas French writers dominate the literary allusions in Dream, English writers dominate More Pricks. And there is evidence that Beckett’s recent reading is being immediately put to use: see how “He [Belacqua] was green, he flut- tered a hand helplessly” (Dream, p. 236), becomes “Belacqua was green, he did the King of Brobdingnag in a quick dumb crambo” (More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, p. 80). Notes 177

34. “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Fried- man et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), pp. 36–7. For the comment on the greater ease of writing “without style” in French, see Niklaus Gessner, quoted in Richard N. Coe, Samuel Beckett (1964; New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 14. 35. Samuel Beckett: Naman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 16. 36. In the poem “Serena I” (begun in 1932 and published in 1935), there is an explicit allusion to Defoe. And note the following in Disjecta: there is an explicit reference to Fielding in a 1934 review of Ezra Pound’s Make It New (p. 78); and references to Swift in a 1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems (p. 68), in the 1935 essay “Censorship in the Saorstat” (p. 87), and in a 1936 review of Jack Yeats’s The Amaranthers (p. 90). 37. A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 4. Subsequent references shall be to this edition. 38. “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 10. 39. Since “the Goddess of Dulness” is referred to in Proust (p. 20), it is possible that Beckett read The Dunciad at Trinity, although the general nature of the allusion suggests that it may be based on his reading of literary history. In addition to the texts mentioned here, Beckett tells MacGreevy in a letter dated 23 March 1936 that he has been reading Pope, mentioning in particular the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717). 40. Although it is not mentioned in the Whoroscope notebook, Knowlson indicates in Damned to Fame, p. 660 n.108, that Beckett read Amelia in May 1935. 41. Pilling, “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 11, notes that Farquhar’s play is referred to (in mangled form) in the addenda to Watt; Rubin Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 163 and 172 n.23, points out an echo of Sheridan’s play in the same novel. 42. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), pp. 162 and 234. 43. We know from Beckett’s letters to MacGreevy and Mary Manning that he was studying Boswell’s biography of Johnson in 1936–37; and on 23 March 1936 Beckett told MacGreevy that he had been reading “wildly all over the place,” and went on to mention, among other writers, Pope and Chester- field. According to Richard Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: a Study (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979), p. 71, the final typescript of the novel is dated 26 June 1936. 44. See Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 56; and, cited for convenience, Letters Written by Lord Chesterfield to His Son, selected by Charles Sayle (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., n.d.), p. 53. 45. Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1979), p. 246. 46. Why Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1989), p. 39. 47. Cited in E. M. Cioran, Partisan Review 41(4) (1979); reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 325. 178 Notes

48. In Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1979), p. 298. 49. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 41. 50. Letter to Knowlson referred to in “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univer- sity Press, 1982), p. 16. 51. What I call “footnoting” is what Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 112, refers to as a “grafting technique.” 52. More Pricks, pp. 49–50; there is also a reference to Bartlett in Dream, p. 148. Knowlson (pp. 742 n.8 and 755) reports that Beckett inherited his father’s 1885 edition of the Familiar Quotations and kept it on his shelves till his death. 53. From an Abandoned Work, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 42; cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 382: “memory, real flypaper.” 54. The same phraseology occurs in one of the draft sections of Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook: “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world: vir nihil valeo, ibi nihil velo (I quote from memory) and inversely. . . . ” 55. “‘For This Relief Much Thanks’: Leopold Bloom and Beckett’s Use of Allu- sion,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 47. Two bungled allusions to Thomas Gray’s poetry would seem to underscore Cohen’s point. In Ulysses (1922; New York: Random House, 1946), Bloom stumbles over the identification of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”: “Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell” (p. 111). In Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), Winnie has trouble remembering a line from the same poet’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “Oh well, what does it matter, that is what I always say, so long as one . . . you know . . . what is that wonderful line . . . laughing wild . . . something something laughing wild amid severest woe” (p. 31). 56. “On First Looking into Beckett’s The Voice,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion, p. 75. 57. Rough for Radio II (1976), in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 119–20. 58. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 352. 59. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th edn (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), indicates that the verb “to cog” meant in the early twentieth century “to cheat,” and more specifically (at least to 1938), “to copy from another.” 60. Beckett might have found Swift’s last words recorded any number of places. Two possible sources: Leslie Stephen, Swift (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 208; or Henry Craik, The Life of Jonathan Swift, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), Vol. 2, p. 257. 61. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. 2, p. 374. Beckett later purchased a secondhand copy of Howard Erskine Hill’s 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life (see Appendix A). 62. Oddly enough, there is no reference on the relevant page of Boswell’s Life to the corridors being called the “galleries”; is the parenthetical part of this Notes 179

note Beckett’s extrapolation and thus the earliest sign of his fictionalization of this item from his research? 63. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 151; the word “mansions” reappears several times in the next few pages. That Beckett was thinking of cells is suggested by the references to their “windowlessness” (p. 152) and, quite inconsistently, the “big barred window” (p. 158). 64. The OED (see definitions 7b and 14) suggests that this meaning of “pavil- ion” was current by the end of the nineteenth century; there are apt quotations from 1885 and 1903. 65. Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (1956; New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 255–6. Subsequent citations shall be to this edition and shall be given in my text. 66. Cf. Dream, p. 44: “the mind at last its own asylum . . . ”; and More Pricks, p. 30: “abstract the asylum and there was little left of Portrane but ruins.” 67. Damned to Fame, pp. 197–9. 68. Tale, pp. 177–8; similarly, Swift inconsistently calls the inmates both “students” and “professors.” 69. Beckett’s “Happy Days”: a Manuscript Study (Columbus: The Ohio State University Libraries, 1977), p. 60.

2 “Hiatus in MS”: Swift and Beckett

1. Dean Swift (1983), Vol. 3 of Swift: the Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962–83), p. 918. 2. Jonathan Swift: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1969), p. vii. 3. Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 71; and Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Samuel Beckett, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), p. 1. See John Fletcher, “Samuel Beckett et Jonathan Swift: vers une étude comparée,” Litteratures X: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse 11 (1962): 81–117. 4. E. M. Cioran in the Partisan Review (1976); reprinted in Samuel Beckett; the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 337. 5. For an account of the skull and death masks, see T. G. Wilson, “A Hitherto Undescribed Death-Mask of Dean Swift,” Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 81 (1951): 107–14. 6. Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 467; but cf. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski, “Introduction” to Re: Joyce ’n Beckett (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. xvi, who assert that these words were composed before Joyce and Beckett met. This passage (what passage is not?) is replete with innuendo: “to work the miracle” may suggest masturbation, as does “hand tune your Erin’s ear.” Could “prisckly” allude to Beckett’s More Pricks? 7. Cf. “swift B.A.A.” and the slang term “sweet B.A.,” or “sweet bugger all,” which Partridge says probably dates back to the early twentieth century. 180 Notes

8. Francis Doherty, in “Watt in an Irish Frame,” Irish University Review 21(2) (Autumn/Winter 1991): 190, points out that Stella in fact stayed in the manor house in Portrane in October 1712, when she endorsed letters from Swift that are part of the Journal. Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), explains that a manor house and then a tower were first built on this site in the early eighteenth century and that they were between 1896 and 1901 incorporated into the Portrane asylum (pp. 233 and 372–3). 9. In Poems in English (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 32. According to O’Brien, p. 264, the “Swift” in this poem was a well-known bicycle of the period. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 51, is in error when she asserts that Beckett’s father in 1927 bought an automobile called a “Swift”; in a letter to me dated 26 November 1992, James Knowlson says that Bill Beckett owned a Delage, not a Swift. 10. Knowlson, Damned to Fame. p. 160. See Hone and Mario M. Rossi, Swift: or the Egotist (New York: Dutton, 1934), p. 32: “It was not mere selfishness, for sometimes he thought of the interests of his friends, and sometimes he had nothing precise to gain for himself: it was egotism. He could not conceive the possibility of others thinking in a way different from himself. Was he not the only man, the only reality in the world?” 11. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 33. 12. Cf. “Madame de la Motte” in the poem “Sanies II,” in Poems in English, p. 34. Mary Power, in “Samuel Beckett’s ‘Fingal’ and the Irish Tradition,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 151–6, goes beyond the pale in her attempt to document the Irishness of this story, arguing that “Winnie Coates is a descendant, almost surely, of Swift’s rational horses, the Houyh- nhnms” (pp. 154–5). 13. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), pp. 178, 84, 224, and 201. Immediately after the allusion to “lile pute” is the following, perhaps punning on Stella’s name: “she tailed off very da capella into a kind of stela you might nearly say.” Cf. Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 179 (“a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers”); and A Tale of a Tub, p. 179 (“the vast Number of Beaux, Fidlers, Poets, and Polit- icians, that the World might recover”). The allusion in More Pricks has become more explicit: “‘We go through this world’ observed the Alba ‘like sunbeams through cracks in cucumbers’” (p. 69). 14. Cf. Gulliver’s Travels, p. 29: gripped by the “Necessities of Nature,” Gulliver in Lilliput tells us that he crawled to the end of his chain and “discharged my Body of that uneasy Load.” 15. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948): Vol. 1, p. 270; Swift’s emphasis. The most accessible edition for Beck- ett would have been the Everyman Library edition, by J. K. Moorhead, which includes an introduction by Sir Walter Scott (London: J. M. Dent, 1924). 16. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 170. 17. Cf. “A Tale of a Tub,” to which is added “The Battle of the Books” and the “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Notes 181

Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958): “knotty Point” (p. 170); “Pudenda of either Sex” (p. 147); and “The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves” (p. 174). There is other phraseology in Murphy with a Swiftian odor, such as “divine flatus” (p. 89), “sublunary excrement” (p. 138), and “prolonged paroxysms” (p. 152). 18. Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963–65): Vol. 2, p. 361. Cf. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 18: “ . . . she violated him after tea.” Beckett could have found an explanation of Swift’s sexual innuendo in Shane Leslie, The Skull of Swift: an Extempore Exhumation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), pp. 196–7. 19. Similarly, Beckett’s allusions to Gulliver in the reviews he wrote during the mid-thirties suggest not only his acquaintance with Swift, but also his compatriot’s relevance to him as a sort of literary touchstone. See Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 68, 87, and 90. 20. See, for example, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. I, pp. 123, 156, 187, 199, and especially 139: “Lady Mountjoy carried me home to dinner, where I staid not long after and came home early, and now am got into bed, for you must always write to your MDs in bed, that’s a maxim.” In the Journal “MD” stands for “my dears,” or Stella and her friend Rebecca Dingley. 21. Cf. the humorous immediacy in “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux,” in More Pricks: “Bel! Bel! Bel! your letter has just come!” (p. 155); “If I dont stop writing you wont be able to read this letter because it will be all ofer tears” (p. 155); “I must get a new nib, this old pen is gone to the dogs, I can’t write with it any more” (pp. 155–6). 22. Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 209. 23. Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 183–206. 24. We may say, however, that it is his life inside his room that dominates Swift’s letters to Stella. Many years ago, Hopewell R. Selby observed in “The Cell and the Garret: Fictions of Confinement in Swift’s Satires and Personal Writings,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), p. 146: “For Swift . . . the problem is more ominous: we cannot find repose within the room, but that is where we are trapped. Worse yet, the room is a prison within our very minds, its fetters the ways of reason itself.” 25. “Young Beckett’s Irish Roots,” Irish University Review: a Journal of Irish Studies 14(1) (Spring 1984): 30. 26. Journal to Stella, Vol. I, pp. 122 and n. 27. For discussions of Beckett’s visit to Bethlehem Royal Hospital, see Bair, pp. 219–20, and Knowlson, pp. 197–200. Note also the reference to a “Bedlamite” in Beckett’s essay on Joyce, in Disjecta, p. 31. 27. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; New York: New American Library, 1965). 28. The same phraseology occurs in the 1946 Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 108: “No time left for putting a shine on the soul, but you can’t have everything, the body in bits, the mind flayed alive. . . . ” 182 Notes

Cf. Virginia Woolf’s appeal to Swift in Orlando: a Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), p. 211: “But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and yourself too!” 29. Review of The Lost Ones in the Partisan Review (1974), reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 323. 30. In “A Tale of a Tub,” Etc., p. 27. 31. Cf. the comparable ambiguity in the Tale, where Bedlam is described as an asylum, but also as a university and as Parliament. 32. Nor is Murphy’s response to the lunatics he observes one of shock or distaste: “They caused Murphy no horror. The most easily identifiable of his immediate feelings were respect and unworthiness” (Murphy, p. 168). 33. The quotation from Hester Thrale, whom I cite from the Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (New York: Books for Libraries, 1980), p. 174, appears in Beckett’s first Johnson notebook, now at Reading University (MS 3461/1/80): “He [Johnson] did not however encourage general satire, and for the most part professed himself to feel directly contrary to Dr. Swift; ‘who (says he) hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and certain individuals.’” The original statement appears in Swift’s letter to Pope of 29 September 1725 in which he gives his rationale for writing Gulliver’s Travels. Thus what we have here is Beckett quoting Mrs. Thrale who is quoting Johnson quoting Swift writing to Pope! 34. John Forster discovered this journal in the late nineteenth century, and it was first printed by Craik in an appendix to his Life of Jonathan Swift (1894). I do not mean here to contradict my suggestion in Chapter 4 that Beckett may have drawn his name from the “Wat” or “Watt” of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker; either or both may have been his source, although the fact that the “Wat” or “Watt” of the Holyhead Journal was Swift’s servant may argue more strongly for this influence. 35. Holyhead Journal, in Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments, and Marginalia, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 203. 36. “Watt in an Irish Frame,” p. 195. Doherty’s essay has been of assistance to me in my recasting of this section, which is based on an essay I originally published some 25 years ago: “The Epistemology of Fictional Failure: Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Beckett’s Watt,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15(4) (Winter 1974): 649–72. 37. Cf. J. Paul Hunter, “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels,” ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 68–9: “Indulge me in a preposterous claim. A Tale of a Tub is also, among other things, a parody of the emerging novel. But how can there be a parody of something that does not yet exist?” 38. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 32. 39. “Samuel Beckett et Jonathan Swift: vers une étude comparée,” Litteratures X: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse 11 (1962): 89. In Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: the Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), Hugh Kenner describes Gulliver’s Travels as an “epistemological satire” (p. 91); in Samuel Beckett: the Language of Self (1962; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1964), Frederick J. Hoffman calls Watt an “epistemological comedy” (p. 133). Subsequent references to Kenner will be given within my text. Notes 183

40. Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 119. 41. See the textual gaps in the Tale, pp. 62–3, 170, and 200, as well as smaller omissions on pp. 108, 176, 179, and 207; cf. Malone Dies, p. 183: “hiatus in my recollections.” More specifically, “Desunt nonnulla,” from The Battle of the Books, in “Tale of a Tub,” Etc., p. 244, appears on the loose p. 100 in Notebook 6 of the Watt MS. Cited with permission of the Beckett Estate and the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas. 42. Cf. the following: “Yet the unhappy shortness of my Memory led me into an Error, from which I must immediately extricate my self. . . . ” (Tale, p. 92); and “And if I failed to mention this detail in its proper place, it is because. . . . ” (Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 41). 43. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Rich- ard Howard (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 229. Cf. Beckett’s comment on what he called his “peephole art,” a medium so-named because, as he said, “it allows the viewer to see what was never meant to be seen.” Quoted by the narrator Chris O’Neill in the video Peephole Art: Beckett for Television, directed by John L. Reilly (New York: Global Village, 1992). 44. Beckett, like Swift, may be playing on “knot” as some problem difficult to resolve (OED); cf. Tale, p. 70 (“I now proceed to unravel this knotty Point”), and Murphy, p. 131 (“These were knotty points”). In the MS of Watt, Note- book 2, p. 43, Beckett toys outrageously with this passage in the Tale; adding a footnote after the word “doorknob,” he writes: “If the reader could bring himself to articulate, at least mentally the k of knob throughout the following development, the k of knob would feel obliged to him.” Quoted with permission. 45. Cf. Dan Rooney in All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 84: “Not Count! One of the few satisfactions in life?” And cf. Johnson’s delight in counting, taken up in Chapter 6. 46. See J. Alane Howard, “The Roots of Beckett’s Aesthetic: Mathematical Allu- sions in Watt,” in Papers on Language and Literature 30(4) (1994): 346–51. 47. For a somewhat different discussion of this theme, see W. B. Carnochan, “Swift’s Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5(1) (1971): 122–44. On the long tradition behind these texts, see the following: Rosalie L. Colie, Chapters 7 and 8 of Paradoxia Epidemica: the Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Henry K. Miller, “The Paradoxical Incomium with Special Reference to its Vogue in England, 1600–1800,” Modern Philology 53(3) (1956): 145–78; and Robert M. Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). 48. In No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 158. 49. In “The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated,” lines 128–9, Pope characterized his friend this way: “And Swift cry wisely, ‘Viva la Baga- telle,’/ The Man that loves and laughs, must sure do well.” The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 350, dismisses his own excoriation: “It’s nothing. A mere bagatelle.” 50. Cf. Proust 21: “the shallow well of a cup’s inscrutable banality.” 184 Notes

51. In “A Tale of a Tub” with Other Early Works, ed. Herbert Davis (1939; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 248. In Dr. Swift (1967), Vol. 2 of Swift: the Man, His Works and the Age, Ehrenpreis makes the point that we should see ATritical Essay as a parody of simplistic methods of argument, but that the ideas are Swift’s own. 52. In Irish Tracts 1720–1723 and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), pp. 159–68.

3 Beckett and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

1. “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Atlantic 220 (August 1967): 31. 2. Beckett refers – echoing common Victorian sentiments – to “the divine Jane”; note also that he may have read some Austen earlier, as is suggested by Belacqua’s snide reference to “the divine Jane” in the 1932 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 119. Subsequent citations of Dream will be to this edition. Cf. Virginia Woolf’s reference in The Voyage Out (1915; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1948), p. 62, to “our beloved Jane.” 3. See the following: Beckett mentions that he has read Joseph Andrews in a letter to MacGreevy dated 8 October 1932; he tells MacGreevy that he has completed Tom Jones in a letter dated 11 November 1932; Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild, and the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon are quoted in the Whoroscope notebook; Humphry Clinker is likewise quoted in this notebook; and in addition to the 1935 letter mentioned above, Beckett in a letter to MacGreevy of 20 February 1935 alludes to Elinor Dashwood, heroine of Sense and Sensibility. 4. These allusions are discussed below. Frankenstein is mentioned in Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 124: “Cooper could not have looked more gratified if he had been Frankenstein’s daemon and Wylie DeLacey.” 5. “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: The Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 12. 6. Mercier et Camier (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1970), p. 204; in Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1975), p. 118, the phrase is “Up Quin!” See also Malone Dies (1956), in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 282. 7. Coetzee, “The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt,” Journal of Modern Literature 2(4) (November 1972): 476. Although Coetzee and John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 156–7, both discredit Beckett’s statement in the early 1960s that he has no idea who Quin is, maybe he did not; after all, it had been some 30 years since he had read Smollett’s novel. 8. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Andre Parreaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 48; for the sake of convenience, subsequent references to Smollett’s novel shall be to this edition and shall be included within my text. Note that “Quin the player” is also mentioned in Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which Beckett read about this Notes 185

same time and perhaps in this edition; see “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: J. M. Dent, 1932), p. 235. 9. More Pricks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 56. The paragraph in which the word shows up has its origin in the draft of Dream, although the word itself does not appear; thus we might guess that Beckett, having read Humphry Clinker in early 1933, inserted the word as he revised this story in the fall of 1933 for inclusion in More Pricks. 10. Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 90. 11. James Knowlson, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 19, suggests a connection between the significance of possessions in Robinson Crusoe and Beckett’s Happy Days. Indeed the image of Winnie half-buried in her little mound, parasol held above her head, is reminiscent of the image of Crusoe (who lived in a cave), trapped on his island, home- made umbrella protecting him from the sun; of course in Beckett’s absurdist world, the parasol spontaneously ignites. 12. In Poems in English (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 37. 13. See Fletcher, p. 32, and Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 88. 14. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 392: “I must describe him in greater detail, see what he’s capable of, whence he comes and whither he returns, in his head of course, we don’t intend to relapse into picaresque. . . . ” And cf. both citations with Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (1941; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965): in “The Publisher to the Reader,” Richard Sympson comments that the only fault he finds in Gulliver’s book is that “the Author, after the Manner of Travellers, is a little too circumstantial” (p. 9). 15. Daniel Defoe, “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Writings, ed. James Sutherland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 46. Subsequent references to Robinson Crusoe shall be to this edition, which is used for the sake of convenience. 16. In addition to toying with the word “see,” Beckett here twice puns on “certain,” which is coupled in each case with an evident lack of certainty. As S. E. Gontarski says in “Molloy and the Reiterated Novel,” in As No Other Dare Fail (London: John Calder, 1986), p. 61: “Such subversion of the ver- acity of the text is an assault not only on the tradition of verisimilitude established by Defoe and Richardson but on the aesthetics of Joyce as well.” 17. Hunter makes this point in the process of pointing out Swift’s awareness of the holes in Defoe’s assumptions in Robinson Crusoe. See “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels,” ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), p. 68. 18. “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography” (1973), reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Daniel Defoe, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 111. 19. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, pp. 326–7. Subsequent references to The Unnamable shall be to this edition. In Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 95, James Knowl- son suggests that in Happy Days Winnie’s frequent phrases like “great mercies” or “tender mercies” are reminiscent of Crusoe’s equally frequent expressions of pious gratitude for the goodness of Providence. 186 Notes

20. “These first three words the bird managed well enough,” Malone adds, “but the celebrated restriction was too much for it, all you heard was a series of squawks.” Leibniz’s “Nihil est in intellectu” is quoted in the Whoroscope notebook, but ironically, Beckett, like the bird, drops the restriction: “Nihil est intellectu nisi intellectus ipse.” 21. “The Writer’s Laboratory: Samuel Beckett and the Death of the Book,” Chapter 10 of Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 183–206. At Trinity, however, Beckett would have read about Richardson in Thompson’s History of English Literature, and as an incoming student at Trinity had to answer a question on Richardson’s narrative technique. See Chapter 1. 22. Reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 78. Beckett is of course punning here on “nice” – meaning finely discriminating but also not obvious, even full of uncertainty (OED). 23. See also the reference to “Molly Seagram’s arras” in More Pricks (p. 90). Once again allusions to Beckett’s recent reading occur in his writing; according to Bair (p. 162), this story was written between May and September 1933, when Beckett sent off the manuscript of More Pricks to Chatto and Windus. 24. Henry Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela,” ed. Martin Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 161; subsequent references to Fielding’s novel shall be to this edition (used for convenience) and shall be included within my text. Belacqua, we are told in More Pricks, “had a strong weakness for oxymoron” (p. 38). 25. Beckett’s knowledge of Milton is not in question: he read Paradise Lost, Book 1, while at Trinity (see Chapter 1); as late as From an Abandoned Work (1957), in First Love and Other Stories (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1974), p. 42, he speaks of telling his father about Milton’s cosmology. On Beckett’s knowledge of Pope, see Chapter 7 below. 26. Tom Jones, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), Book 3, Chap. 6, p. 104; subsequent references to Tom Jones will be to this edition. Fielding elsewhere mentions Hogarth: see Joseph Andrews, Preface, p. 9 and Book 1, Chap. 8, pp. 32 and 50; and see Tom Jones, Book 1, Chap. 11, p. 51, and Book 6, Chap. 3, p. 214. In these last two instances he likewise refers the reader to a particular Hogarth print in order to clarify a verbal description. 27. Letter dated 18 August 1934. This painting, which Beckett describes as “the family group one” (realizing McGreevy would know it), is the c. 1729 “Denunciation (for a respectable citizen falsely accused of fathering a child).” 28. Beckett goes on to say that “the hero is suggested admirably, almost a physical weight on the page,” and tells MacGreevy that “the short chapters are an idea.” 29. See the provocative article by Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?”, in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 11–27. Referring to Fielding and Sterne, Cohen argues for a historical linkage between eighteenth-century and postmodern genres. 30. As the manuscript of the typescript of Dream reveals, Beckett first wrote “He was a great, big, inward man . . . ,” only later crossing out “was” and sub- stituting “is”; thus we know that he in fact concocted the whole stylistic dilemma in this passage! Notes 187

31. K. G. Simpson, “Technique as Judgment in Tom Jones,” in Henry Fielding: Justice Observed (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985), pp. 167–8. Cf. Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961): 23: “The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps.’” He might have said the same of his novels. 32. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 405. McKeon points out how in spite of calling itself (on the title page and elsewhere) a true and authentic “history,” Joseph Andrews everywhere reveals a skepticism toward this truth and authenticity, as Fielding parodies himself and posits a form based on “a series of contra- dictory negations” (pp. 403–4). 33. “Thomas Mann and Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction,” in Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 285. 34. Mayoux, “Samuel Beckett and Universal Parody,” in Samuel Beckett: a Collec- tion of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 84; and Fletcher, p. 95. Although Fletcher points to a curious parallel between the masturbation scene at the beginning of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and a scene in Tristram Shandy, Beckett did not read Sterne’s novel until 1938. 35. “Introductory Essay” (1967), reprinted in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. xv. 36. Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 292; but cf. Knowlson, p. 677 n.168, who says that Beckett in a letter of 14 January 1963 mentioned to William York Tindall that he had a great admiration for Sterne, especially Tristram Shandy. 37. This is the letter alluded to by Bair. Note, however, that in addition to the change of Beckett’s “felicities” to her own “facility” (perhaps not a change worth quibbling over), there is no reference in the letter to Beckett’s having decided at this point “that he had little liking for Sterne.” 38. It is perhaps relevant that Henri Fluchère’s Laurence Sterne, de l’homme à l’œuvre: Biographie critique et essai d’ interprétation de “Tristram Shandy” (1961) had been translated by Beckett’s long-time friend and romantic attachment Barbara Bray: Laurence Sterne from Tristram to Yorick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965). 39. In The Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 119–20. Although the Stenographer’s statement that she has never read Sterne might be viewed as Beckett’s disclaimer of Sterne’s importance to him, it is relevant that on the previous page she likewise admits to having never read Dante’s Purgatorio – unques- tionably, one of Beckett’s favorite works. 40. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 352; subsequent references to Tristram Shandy shall be to this edition and shall be given by volume, chapter, and page number within my text. 41. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 77. 42. English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 1987), p. 138. 188 Notes

43. “Introduction” to Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 7. 44. In Malone Dies, p. 305, there is another probable echo of Tristram Shandy: “Why should I have a sex, who no longer have a nose?” As readers of Sterne’s novel know very well, Tristram’s loss of his “nose” to the falling window-sash is a source of great humor. 45. “Sterne’s Novels: Gathering up the Fragments,” ELH 49 (1982): 41. 46. Note the following curious similarity. As part of his Entrance Examination at Trinity College in November 1923, Beckett was asked to translate the following into French: “The ass was in the meadow, thinking of life and death, while he ate the grass. He saw a man who was approaching. He knew that men never think of life and death. They only eat. He did not wish to wait for the man. The man would only beat him and make him drag a cart. The man would rather earn money than think. The ass preferred to think. ‘There is nothing worth doing. Why do anything?’ Meanwhile the man had arrived. The ass had forgotten to run away.” Annual Records of Terms and Examinations (detailed series), MUN Vol. 23/No. 82. 47. Bair, p. 11; see photograph between pp. 114 and 115 of May Beckett riding in a little cart pulled by a donkey. 48. Although there is a touch of the sentimental in this scene (about as sentimental as one is apt to get in Beckett), neither he nor Sterne lets us forget that we are dealing with animals. Compare the following from Tristram Shandy: “The old mule let a f—” (Vol. 7, Chap. 12, p. 508); with this from All That Fall:

Mrs. Rooney Mercy! What was that? Christy Never mind her, Ma’am, she’s very fresh in herself today. (p. 13)

49. Cf. Bair, p. 11, who recounts a story about how on one occasion May Beckett saw a tinker beating a donkey, upbraided him for his behavior, and ended up purchasing the animal on the spot. In his Whoroscope notebook, Beckett copies out a lengthy passage on the hinny from Darwin’s Origin of Species; however, I do not agree with John Pilling, “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 6, that the hinny in All That Fall was “prompted by” Beckett’s reading of this passage. Rather, I think Beckett’s scene was prompted by the parallel incident in Sterne, although it is possible that Darwin was at this time still in his mind, or made him pay special attention to this scene. 50. Reprinted in The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932, and in Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 98. On the function of silence in each author, compare the following brief examples: “So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de cham- bre’s—” (A Sentimental Journey, p. 148); “The empty too. Away. No hands in the—” (Worstward Ho [New York: Grove Press, 1983], p. 33). 51. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (1974; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 258. 52. Cf. addendum to Watt, p. 248: “never been properly born.” 53. Bair, p. 208; cf. pp. 401–2. 54. Beckett frequently toys with this paradox. Cf. Malone Dies: “I shall never get born and therefore never get dead” (p. 225). According to Lawrence Harvey, Notes 189

Samuel Beckett, Poet & Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 414–15, Beckett spoke of “a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué.” 55. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study, new edn (1961; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 190. See also Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: a Study of Samuel Beckett (London: Rupert Hart- Davis, 1969), p. 213; and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, p. 78. 56. The second of these points I develop more fully in “Fiction as Composing Process: How It Is,” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 107–21. 57. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 79. 58. Partial Magic: the Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 226. 59. Book 1, lines 61 and 242, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Cf. An Essay on Criticism: “half-learn’d Witlings” (line 40), and “half-form’d Insects” and “Unfinish’d Things” (line 42).

4 “Gentle Skimmer”: Reader Entrapment in Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett

1. Letter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725. Swift wrote this as he was completing Gulliver’s Travels. 2. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 254. 3. “Ulysses and the Reader” (1982), reprinted in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 133. 4. 29 September 1725. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963–65), Vol. 3, p. 103. 5. In Hungarian Studies in English 12 (1979): 49–59. Among more recent studies, see the following: James Acheson, “Chess with the Audience: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame” (1980), reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), pp. 181–92; Karen L. Laugh- lin, “Seeing is Perceiving: Beckett’s Later Plays and the Theory of Audience Response,” in ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Irish Literary Studies 30), ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler (Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1988), pp. 20–9; Michael Patrick Gillespie, “Textually Uninhibited: the Playfulness of Joyce and Beckett,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski (New York: Fordham UP, 1992), pp. 83–103; and Wolfgang Iser, “Counter-sensical Comedy and Audience Response in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot” (1987), reprinted in New Casebooks: “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” ed. Steven Connor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 55–70. 6. For a discussion of the notion of text as game, see Iser, “The Play of the Text,” in Prospecting, pp. 249–61. It is perhaps relevant that Beckett said to Jessica Tandy, who played Mouth in the 1973 Lincoln Center production of Not I: “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect”; quoted by 190 Notes

S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 19. 7. Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 112. Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” rev. edn (1980; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 112, notes that “Swift called Wood (of Wood’s halfpence) a son of a beech.” 8. Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 106. 9. “Assumption,” transition 16–17 (June 1929): 268. 10. “Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce,” originally published in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 26. And see Suzette A. Henke, “Exagmin- ing Beckett & Company,” in Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), who refers to Beckett as a “critic-magician” who in this essay “winks slyly at his reader” (pp. 64 and 68). 11. Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), pp. 27–8. 12. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 25. 13. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 116. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given by volume, chapter, and page number. 14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), Vol. 1, Chap. 20, p. 48. Subsequent references will be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. Beckett, “From an Abandoned Work” (1958), in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (London: Calder and Boyers, 1967), p. 145: “Now is there nothing to add to this day with the white horse and white mother in the window, please read again my descriptions of these, before I get on to some other day at a later time. . . . ” 15. Knowlson (p. 122) reports that Beckett delivered Proust to the publisher in September 1930. On 4 November 1932 the author wrote to MacGreevy that he had finished Tom Jones; on 5 August 1938 he told him that he had been reading Tristram Shandy, a book he owned at his death (see Appendix A). It should be noted, however, that in preparation for his Junior Exhibition in the fall of 1923, Beckett would have read fragments of both novels in Smith’s Specimens of English Literature (see Chapter 1). 16. Although his point is somewhat different, John Pilling, in “Beckett’s Proust,” Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Winter 1976): 10, describes in similar terms the ambiguity of Beckett’s cordial invitation to his reader. 17. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992): pp. 186, 168, and 184; subsequent citations shall be given within my text. Since Beckett elsewhere uses the pronoun “we” and then explains that he intends by this a “consensus, here and here- after, of me” (p. 5), it would seem that this “you” refers not to you or me specifically but to his readers collectively. 18. For example, the “gentle reader” is referred to in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 54, 105, 176, and 203; subsequent references to the Tale Notes 191

shall be to this edition. Cf. the numerous other epithets used in reference to the reader of the Tale, such as “courteous reader,” “candid reader,” and “learned reader.” 19. For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Literary Cooperation and Implicature,” in Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London: Metheun and Co., 1981), pp. 377–412. 20. See G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 108: “The Tale thus participates in that important but little-studied Augustan interest in reading and interpretation that Dryden makes the center of attention in Religio Laici, which can be read as a layman’s approach to reading. The Tale may even be ‘about’ the effort to read and a satire on the perhaps inevitable desire to reduce and make comprehensible.” 21. “Hop-me-thumb” is a nineteenth-century contraction of “hop-o’-my-thumb,” or a person so small that he may be said to hop on one’s thumb, like Tom Thumb (OED). The diction here is demanding: “hisses” suggests the response of a fault-finding reader, but also relates the reader to the pipes themselves. Cf. Beckett’s letter to James Knowlson of 11 April 1972 in which he speaks about himself as a sort of plumber, knowing nothing of the “history of hydraulics” but simply using “bits of pipe I happen to have with me.” James Knowlson, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univer- sity Press, 1983), pp. 16–25. 22. See The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); and The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Beckett uses one of Iser’s words in a comparable sense in The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965): “Gaps, there have always been gaps, it’s the voice stopping . . . ” (p. 369). Cf. Fielding’s apology for “blanks” in the action which necessarily lead to “chasms” in his novel (Tom Jones, Vol. 2, Chap. 1, p. 59), and Sterne’s reference to the unfortunate “breaks and gaps” in Tristram’s story (Tristram Shandy, Vol. 6, Chap. 33, p. 351). 23. More Pricks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), pp. 76–81; subsequent references will be to this edition. It is interesting that in revising this passage from Dream for inclusion here, Beckett added not only an allusion to Swift but also a reference to Belacqua’s “quick dumb crambo,” which the OED defines as follows: “A game in which one set of players have to guess a word agreed upon by the other set, after being told what word it rhymes with, by acting in dumb show one word after another till they find it.” 24. Cf. Dream, p. 72: “As an herpetic taratantaratarantula (have you spotted the style?) hath he consumed away.” And cf. Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 170: “All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being – all give it up?” 25. I paraphrase Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 149: “Typically, throughout the entire [novel], whenever Beckett makes a serious statement, he denigrates it.” 26. “Readers in Texts,” PMLA 96 (1981): 848–63. 192 Notes

27. For a fuller discussion of this terminology, see my essay titled “The Danger of Reading Swift: the Double Binds of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Reader Entrap- ment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 109–30. 28. 25 September 1933. Used with permission of Reading University and the Samuel Beckett Estate. 29. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), p. 224; subsequent references will be to this edition and included in my text. 30. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 112. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 31. Elsewhere in Murphy, an allusion to the “gentle compositor” (p. 236) humor- ously shifts attention from the reader – and the author himself – to the mechanical laying down of type. It is perhaps relevant that there is a reference in the Watt manuscript (Notebook 1, p. 91) and typescript (n.p., pencil 73) to “gentle readers,” although the reference seems not to have survived in the published novel. Cited with permission of the Beckett Estate and the University of Texas. 32. Henry Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela,” ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 131. Cf. Jonathan Wild, in “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” ed. A. R. Humphreys (1932; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1964): “Heartfree returned this goodness (as it is called) of his wife with the warmest gratitude, and they passed an hour in a scene of tenderness too low and contemptible to be recounted to our great readers. We shall, therefore, omit all such relations, as they tend only to make human nature low and ridiculous” (p. 67). 33. Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90 (1975): 14. 34. “Preface: Swift and the Reader’s Role,” in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. Clive T. Probyn (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), p. 9. 35. “Tom Jones and the Farewell to Providential Fiction” (1985), reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Henry Fielding, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 233. 36. The Implied Reader, pp. 31 and 47. Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Post- modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), refers to the “typically postmodern” dialogue between a narrative voice and a projected reader (p. 10). 37. Surprisingly, in the late play Footfalls (1976), in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), there is a direct reference to “the reader”: “Mrs. W. did not at once reply. But finally, raising her head and fixing Amy – the daughter’s given name, as the reader will remember – raising her head and fixing Amy full in the eye she said . . . ” (pp. 242–3). “The Reader will be pleased to remember” (p. 87), “The Reader may remember” (p. 107), and like phraseology appears on a number of occasions in Tom Jones – a book Beckett read more than 40 years earlier. Curiously enough, here we have a trait of eighteenth-century novels affecting one of Beckett’s plays! 38. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 154. 39. At one point in the early novel Beckett uses an ellipsis, then pauses to ask the reader: “The dots are nice don’t you think? Trine. Yessir” (p. 107). The affirmative response obviously is ours, indicating a kind of acknowledg- Notes 193

ment of our inferiority. And here also I have words put in my mouth: “Are they [the characters] then to be let slide? Are they, squeezed dry, to be cast aside into the gutter, the tragic gutter of not being referred to in this book? You fondly ask” (p. 158). The questions suggest that we expect of literary characters a properly explained departure, as one would get in a conventional novel. The adverb “fondly” suggests Beckett’s view of our naive questions. 40. Molloy, in Three Novels, pp. 27 and 43. Subsequent references to this novel will be to this edition and will be given in my text. 41. J. Paul Hunter, “The Insistent I,” Novel 13 (1979): 19–37. 42. In the Journal to Stella, which Beckett knew well (see Chapter 2), Swift asks in the midst of an especially ambiguous passage: “Who talks?” See the Journal, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. 2, p. 380. 43. Cf. Robert Burton’s blatant observation in “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” The Anatomy of Melancholy, in (used for convenience) Seventeenth- Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert P. Tristram Coffin and Alexander M. Witherspoon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), p. 156: “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.” 44. There are numerous similar examples of reader entrapment in Tristram Shandy, as in the passage in Volume 7, Chapter 9, p. 404, where Tristram promises to describe the female figure of one Janatone “with as determin’d a pencil, as if I had her in the wettest drapery.—” He then declines to do so: “But your worships chuse rather that I give you the length, breadth, and perpendicular height of the great parish church. . . . ” 45. Imagination Dead Imagine, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 63. 46. Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 7. 47. Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 8. 48. Beckett early on employed metatheatrical metaphors in his fiction. See this humorous example in Dream, pp. 149–50: “About the final curtain: if there be one to be taken . . . we rather fancy Belacqua is the boy that will take it, all on his own, bowing left and right, bowing slightly to the plaudits. Now the figure solicits to be carried forward. It proffers fire-curtains, emergency exits, the green room and the stage door.” 49. The Created Self: the Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1970), pp. 209–10. 50. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 48B. 51. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 389.

5 Beckett’s Literary Gerontophilia

1. Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 30. Subsequent references to Ellmann will be to this edition. 2. Cf. Joyce’s far less empathetic tone in Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 115: “And, speaking anent Tiberias and other inces- tuish salacities among gerontophils. . . . ” 194 Notes

3. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1938), p. 25. The verbal echoes here, as well as Celia’s visit in Chapter 8 to see the old men kite-flyers, show how Beckett used his letter to MacGreevy as a place to draft this scene. Subsequent references to Murphy will be to this edition. 4. Both the original manuscript and the typescript are preserved at the Harry K. Ransom Research Center, The University of Texas: Mr. Hackett’s age is mentioned in MS 1, p. 41, and TS, p. 15 (pencilled p. 29); the reference to Watt’s novel appears in MS 3, p. 32, and TS, p. 105 (pencilled p. 211). Cf. the fourth addendum to Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 247: “who may tell the tale/of the old man?” 5. Molloy, in Three Novels: “Molloy,”“Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable” (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 112–13; and The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 398. Subsequent references to these novels shall be to this edition. 6. For the sake of convenience, I refer to Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Andre Parreaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 122. On Beckett’s reading of Smollett, see Chapter 3. 7. “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” in “A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue,”“Polite Conversation,” Etc., ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1964), p. 252. See Ricks, “Beckett and the Lobster,” New Statesman (1964), reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Lance St John Butler (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 132. 8. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 58A, and “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico...Joyce,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 22. Cf. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 8: “grave-sheets serve as swaddling- clothes”; and How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 70: “having been born octogenerian. . . . ” Subsequent citations of How It Is refer to this edition. 9. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 80. For further discussion of Beckett’s habit of fusing birth and death, see Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993). 10. Cf. p. 189, where, in the context of a discussion of how he intends to tell his “story,” Malone refers to “the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go.” 11. To these we may add Berkeley’s Commonplace Book (which he read in 1932 and owned at his death), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (read in 1936–37), and the diaries of Johnson himself (read in 1936–37). 12. “The Sentimental Journey,” originally published in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (New York: Har- court, Brace and World, 1967), p. 96. Of course I do not mean to suggest that Beckett had an interest in such works written in English only, or only in the eighteenth century: on 24 February 1931, he informed MacGreevy that he was reading Jules Renard’s Journal (kept between 1887 and 1910); and on 5 August 1938 he told him that he had recently been reading Alfred Victor de Vigny’s nineteenth-century Journal. 13. See “The Writer’s Laboratory: Samuel Beckett and the Death of the Book,” Chapter 10 of Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). The line between diary or journal and diary fiction, as Abbott demonstrates, is not altogether clear. Notes 195

14. For convenience, quoted from Discussions of Jonathan Swift, ed. John Traugott (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1962), p. 72. 15. Introduction to Mario M. Rossi and Joseph M. Hone, Bishop Berkeley (1931), reprinted in W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), pp. 397, 399–400. 16. Swift: the Man, His Work, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962–83). 17. Orlando (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), p. 211. 18. Finnegans Wake, pp. 294 and 423. 19. Reproduced in James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: a Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” expanded edn (1959; Mamaro- neck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1979), p. 119. The connection between madness and his own death is one about which Swift spoke at the end of “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” which Beckett had read. 20. Leslie Stephen, Swift (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 183. See Donald M. Berwick, The Reputation of Jonathan Swift: 1781–1882 (New York: Haskell House, 1965), p. 128. This earlier emphasis on the tragic Swift can be traced by means of Milton Voigt’s Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), especially Chapters 1 (“Nineteenth-Century Views”) and 5 (“Swift the Man”). 21. John Churton Collins, Jonathan Swift: a Biographical and Critical Study (1893; reprinted Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970), pp. 227, 230, and 235. On Beckett and the Struldbruggs, see Ricks, pp. 25–6. 22. The Skull of Swift (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928). The fascination at this time with the death of Swift is suggested also in Stephen Gwynn’s The Life and Friendships of Dean Swift (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1933), which, while not as melodramatic as Leslie’s account, contains in its final chapter (titled “The End”) a drawing of Swift’s death mask. 23. Swift; or the Egotist (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1934), p. 373. The reference to the “tragedy” of Swift appears on p. 371. 24. The Life of Jonathan Swift, 2 vols., 2nd edn (1882; London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), which in Appendix XIII (“Swift’s Disease”) outlines the work of both Wilde and Bucknill. Subsequent references to Craik will be given within my text. 25. See esp. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 146: “Watt, looking up, saw that Mr. Knott’s eyes were closed, and heard his breathing, soft and shallow, like the breathing of a child asleep.” 26. Ellmann, p. 27. 27. In No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1966 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), pp. 142–3. 28. Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello (1926; London: John Murray, 1937), pp. 111–12. 29. I am grateful to the Trinity College Library for permission to quote from MS 1975/29 and, below, from MSS 1975/43 and 1975/51. The sentence cited here appears also in Starkie’s introduction to his translation of Don Quixote of la Mancha (1957; New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 15. Although these notes apparently date from the period 1962–70, when Starkie was a Professor in Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles, it is significant that in the citations and bibliography he cites only 196 Notes

biographical and critical works published between 1892 and 1926, suggest- ing that this is the period during which he was formulating his ideas. 30. Dobson, “Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon,” in Eighteenth Century Vignettes, First Series (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 68; Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945), Vol. 3, p. 25; and Pagliaro, Introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (New York: Nardon Press, 1963), p. 9. 31. See The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon” (1932; London: J. M. Dent, 1968), pp. 194–5. Subse- quent references to the Voyage will be to this edition (which, noting its date of publication, was probably the one Beckett read) and will be given within my text. Fielding’s pragmatic motivation for writing, which belies the need for a dying man to keep busy, is reminiscent of the comparable explanation offered at the beginning of Molloy, p. 7: “There’s this man who comes every week. . . . He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money.” Cf. the similar pragmatic motivation behind Johnson’s writing of Rasselas, a book dealing with the meaning of life which nevertheless is reported to have been written to defray a mother’s funeral expenses. 32. The quotation is as follows: “dropsical: neither residence in dung (Heraclitus) nor Berkeley’s tar water (Fielding) . . . [illegible] . . . watery accumulation.” Cf. Beckett’s reference in Murphy, p. 108, to Berkeley’s “idealist tar.” A reference to the tar-water treatment in Yeats’s introduction to Hone and Rossi’s Bishop Berkeley, reprinted in Essays and Introductions, perhaps sheds light on Beckett’s interest here: “Did tar-water, a cure-all learnt from American Indians, suggest that though [Berkeley] could not quiet men’s minds he might give their bodies quiet”? (p. 399). 33. One anecdote (see Cross, p. 17) may have been picked up many years later by Beckett: so ill was Fielding that he could not bear to look at himself, insisting that the mirrors in his presence be covered with cloths; this scene has a striking resemblance to one in Beckett’s Film (New York: Grove Press, 1969), pp. 26–7 and 30–1, where Buster Keaton twice covers the mirror in his room so as not to be forced to witness his own face. 34. See “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” p. 27: “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” 35. Dobson, “Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon,” pp. 66 and 63, and Fielding (English Men of Letters Series), ed. John Morley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), pp. 160 and 176; and Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (1918; New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963), Vol. 3, p. 5. 36. Rough for Radio II, in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Weiden- feld, 1984), pp. 119–20; the play was written in French in the early 1960s and then broadcast and published in English in 1976. Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 185 n. 109, also identifies the reference to Tristram Shandy. 37. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1997), Vol. 6, Chap. 10, pp. 353–4; subsequent citations of Sterne’s novel will be to this edition and Notes 197

will be noted within my text. It is tempting to make something of the phraseology “shall I go on?” The Unnamable concludes: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Three Novels, p. 414). 38. Letter to David Garrick, in Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (1935; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 87. 39. Cf. the buried mule in Malone Dies, referred to as a “striking death’s-head” (p. 211). 40. See Cross, p. 35: “From the first he had been a delicate boy. . . . A dread disease lurking in his blood became manifest near the close of his residence at Cambridge. One night he was startled out of sleep by a hemorrhage of the lungs, ‘bleeding,’ he says, ‘the bed full.’” See Peter Steele, “Sterne’s Script: the Performing of Tristram Shandy,” in Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 199: “Sterne, much excercised by mortality, is aware too of the constant likelihood that the life of human indeavor itself will gutter out. For all his customary briskness, he has many essays in the momento mori, as he calls to mind the embolism of futility that seems to be within us all the time.” 41. Cf. Stories and Texts (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 11: “When my father died I could have got rid of this hat, there was nothing more to prevent me, but not I.” 42. Abbott, p. 193. 43. Byrd, Tristram Shandy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 17–18. The epigraph to this volume, from Pliny the Younger, may be translated: “For this is not an excursion from it, but is the work itself.” 44. Cf. Malone Dies, p. 274: “Death must take me for someone else.” This well- known scene from Tristram Shandy is the one captured in Thomas Patch’s 1766 caricature in oil of a gaunt Sterne meeting at his door the skeletal image of Death, holding a scythe and an hourglass; Patch later did both a line engraving based on this painting and then an etching, which he published in his book Twenty-Five Caricatures (1769). See Plate 4. 45. Laurence Sterne: the Later Years (London: Metheun and Co., 1986), p. 259. 46. Cf. Tristram Shandy, Vol. 5, Chap. 16, p. 375: “I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sun-dial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground”; and Molloy, p. 47: “Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.” Beckett is apparently alluding to the view of God held by eighteenth-century Deists. 47. Byrd, p. 17. 48. Cf. Malone Dies, p. 254: “I might have extracted myself from my bed and perhaps even got myself back into it, when tired of rolling and dragging myself about the floor or on the stair. That would have introduced a little variety into my decomposition.” 49. Steele, p. 201. 50. Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 249, says that Beckett used this phrase in conversation. 51. In Letter IX Sterne actually compares his love to Swift’s. Beckett could have found Sterne’s letters to Eliza which are not contained in the Journal to Eliza 198 Notes

proper in the single volume of Sterne’s 1780 Works which he owned (see Appendix A), while the Journal itself he could have found in any of several places: for example, in Vol. 8 of The Works and Life of Laurence Sterne, ed. Wilbur L. Cross, 12 vols. (New York: J. F. Taylor and Co., 1904); or, perhaps more readily, in “A Sentimental Journey” [and] “The Journal to Eliza” (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927). I quote from the latter. 52. “I am ill—very ill—Yet I feel my Existence Strongly,” wrote Sterne to a friend only a few days before his death, and he went on to say that he was beginning a comic romance. In Letters of Laurence Sterne, p. 416. 53. “Three Dialogues” (1949), reprinted in Disjecta, p. 139. 54. See “When I come to be old” in A Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. xxxvii. 55. “Yellow,” in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), pp. 159–60; cf. Molloy, p. 54: “What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.” Beckett could have come across Swift’s last words in the biographies of Stephen (1882), Craik (1882), or Collins (1893). 56. In As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), pp. 131–4, esp. 132. See Porter Abbott’s moving account of Joseph Chaikin’s reading of this poem at the 1993 meeting of the Modern Lan- guage Association: The Beckett Circle: Newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society 16(1) (Spring 1994): 16; Chaikin, actor and director, suffers from aphasia, the result of a stroke. 57. The first of these statements appears in Stephen, p. 208, and the second in Craik, p. 257. It is ironic that although Swift’s last spoken words have endured, Beckett’s (as Malone foresaw) have vanished. 58. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson defines “folly” as a “want of understanding; weakness of intellect.” The word is used four times in Beckett’s trilogy and in The Unnamable he refers to writing itself as “that bit- ter folly” (p. 301).

6 “My Johnson Fantasy”

1. “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” lines 255–8. 2. The full statement (its significance will become clear) is as follows: “My efforts to document my Johnson fantasy have not ceased. The evidence for it is overwhelming.” 3. Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 255–6; Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 162. Indeed my own review of the evidence underscores Cohn’s comment on the tension between biographical evidence and Beckett’s imagination. 4. Cohn, pp. 161–2; Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 55. 5. See Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927–28): “The personality of Johnson counts for more than his literary work” (Vol. 2, p. 138). As mentioned in Chapter 1, the History was recommended to Trinity College students when Beckett was there. Notes 199

6. Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 241. 7. The scene of Johnson kicking the stone is reported in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clar- endon Press, 1934–50), Vol. 1, p. 471. Subsequent references to Boswell’s Life shall be to this edition and shall be included within my text. 8. Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: the Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 134, suggests that on p. 38 of Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), Joyce parodies John- son: “Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure.” 9. There is evidence that Beckett owned Johnson’s Dictionary during at least part of the time he maintained the Whoroscope notebook: a number of rare words listed individually in that notebook, including “increpation,” “carminative,” “inosculation,” and “to snite” are to be found in the Diction- ary; moreover, the term “articulated air (Locke)” is identified precisely this way by Johnson. See Appendix A. 10. Bair, p. 206, and Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 193. 11. I am grateful to Dr. Graham Nicholls, Curator of The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, for sending me copies of pages from Dr. Johnson and His Birthplace, the 1933 official guidebook, and for checking the guest book for 1935 for Beckett’s name (letter to author dated 12 November 1992). It perhaps goes without saying that an unsigned guest book in no way precludes the possiblility that Beckett visited Johnson’s birthplace; it only fails to offer substantiation of the visit projected in his letter to MacGreevy. 12. See Richard L. Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: a Study (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979), p. 71. 13. Stephen’s Johnson was on the Trinity College reading list for the Ordinary Examinations in the Hilary 1925 term. Although Beckett sat that term for the Honors Examination, he was a good student and may have read the biography then; if so, then we would have to view his encounter with Johnson the man as beginning some ten years earlier than is discussed here. 14. Beckett’s reference to “Samuel Johnson LL.D.” may suggest that by this date he had read Hawkins’ The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). 15. In Just Play, p. 148, Cohn reports that in his later life Beckett could no longer remember why he fixed on a play; it is interesting, however, that numerous scenes in Boswell’s Life are themselves presented in dramatic form, with speakers identified. Furthermore, I have elsewhere noted paral- lels between Beckett and Virginia Woolf, and here should mention that Beckett might have discovered something of use in her essay “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party,” published in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), in particular a highly evocative scene where Johnson was the featured, though silent, guest. So too in Orlando: a Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), p. 222, Woolf says that Orlando once stood mesmerized for half an hour outside Johnson’s lodgings in Bolt Court, watching the shadows of Johnson, Boswell, and the blind Mrs. Williams, adding: “Never was any play so absorbing.” 200 Notes

16. For a different interpretation, see Mary Bryden, “Figures of Golgotha: Beckett’s Pinioned People,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), pp. 55–9. The doodle is reproduced on p. 57 of Bryden’s essay. 17. For an account of the discovery of this manuscript, see David Buchanan, The Treasure of Auchinleck: the Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw- Hill Publishers, 1974), pp. 162–4. 18. Boswell, Life, Vol. 4, p. 381; Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (abridged), ed. Bertram H. Davis (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 261; and Rolleston, in Aspects (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1928), p. 296. Subsequent references to Hawkins shall be to the above edition and shall be included within my text. 19. In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 73. 20. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 60; subsequent citations shall be included in my text. See also Francis Doherty, “Watt in an Irish Frame,” Irish University Review 21(2) (Autumn/Winter 1991): 188: “In the opening scene, ‘Tetty’ . . . reminds us of Beckett’s hero, Samuel Johnson, married to his ‘Tetty,’ drug-addict and alcoholic.” The late Rubin Rabinovitz pointed out to me that Mr. Hackett’s statement about Watt, that “He is not a native of the rocks” (Watt, p. 21), echoes the phraseology Johnson used in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, reprinted in Boswell’s Life, Vol. 1, p. 262: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” 21. Cf. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 9A–B, in which Vladimir and Estragon discuss the differences among the four Evangelists’ rendering of the Crucifixion. 22. In Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1958), p. 3. Subsequent citations shall be to this edition. 23. In The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 265. 24. Dream, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 200, and pp. 8 and 237, 241, and 147. 25. Cf. Legouis and Cazamian, p. 139: “The search for balance, with Johnson, is an effort of will, a struggle against himself. Without being the least romantic, he is a troubled if not divided soul; a narrow but deep sensibility lies beneath its rough exterior.” See note 5 above. 26. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 350: “a billybowl of thorns.” There may be an allusion here to a similar figure in Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness; for a discussion, see Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), pp. 291–3, and p. 382 n. 173. 27. In The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1984), p. 75. Cohn, p. 158, was the first to note the origin of this phrase in Johnson. 28. How It Is (New York: Grove, 1964), p. 19. Subsequent references to Beckett’s novel shall be included within my text. 29. Vulliamy, Mrs. Thrale of Streatham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), p. 101. 30. Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (1925; New York: Arno Press, 1980), p. 52. Cf. Lionel Kelly, who in Notes 201

“Beckett’s Human Wishes,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 31, underscores Beckett’s interest in “the implied relationship between physical illness and intellectual despair”; his point about the imaginative link between Johnson’s view of his birthday (as expressed in the Annals) and Krapp’s Last Tape is especially convincing. 31. Hawkins, p. 134; Piozzi, p. 18, and cf. pp. 99–100: “The vacuity of life had at some early period of his life struck so forcibly on the mind of Mr. Johnson, that it became by repeated impression his favourite hypothesis . . . all was done to fill up the time, upon his principle.” 32. Beckett cites this in the first of his three Johnson notebooks (MS 3461/1 [p. 73]). Note that Boswell likewise refers to Johnson’s fondness for arithmetic (Vol. 1, p. 72, and Vol. 3, p. 207). It is interesting, in light of Joyce’s reference in Finnegans Wake to “Hodder’s and Cocker’s erithmatic” (p. 537), to see that Beckett in his second notebook (MS 3461/2 [p. 60]) quotes John- son’s advice to Queeney Thrale that she buy “Cocker’s, Hodder’s, and Wingate’s Arithmetic, and any other that every shop or stall will put in your way.” Is there influence here, and if so, who is influencing whom? Had Beckett been discussing his research with Joyce? See The Queeney Letters, ed. William Edmund Lansdowne (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 32. 33. All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 30; for other allusions to mathematics, see Malone Dies, pp. 202, 237, and 251, and also The Unnamable, pp. 299 and 388. 34. Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 50. Cf. The Unnamable, p. 368: “I think I must have blackouts, whole sentences lost, no, not whole.” Cf. also the “divine aphasia” suffered by Lucky’s God and the following from Malone Dies, p. 270: “My voice has gone dead, the rest will follow.” 35. Cf. Boswell’s quotation from Johnson: “I have so far recovered my vocal powers, as to repeat the Lord’s Prayer with no very imperfect articulation” (Vol. 4, p. 231). In Endgame, p. 55, Nagg recites a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer before being silenced by Hamm. 36. Hawkins says that Johnson first used a lancet on one leg, then got hold of a pair of scissors and plunged them deep into the calf of each leg (p. 275). Hawkins’ lancet and scissors is echoed in Molloy’s “knife” and “secateurs.” 37. Edward Tomarken, Johnson, “Rasselas,” and the Choice of Criticism (Lexing- ton: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), p. 14. 38. Beckett in this letter opposes Barry’s portrait of Johnson to “the various Reynoldses,” which he apparently thought did not capture the vulnerabil- ity he had discovered in Johnson. Note that he did not at this time see the original portrait, as he says in an autobiographical passage jettisoned from the manuscript and typescript of Watt, now at the Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas: “Sneaking out of the Nat. Port. Gall., where we had sought in vain the portrait by Barry of Johnson, is the great loss” (MS 3, p. 32 [verso]); and “Sneaking out of the National Portrait Gallery, where all the portraits and busts of Dr. Johnson were as usual on view except the one we sought –” (TS, p. 215). Cited with permission. Originally composed in the fall of 1942, while Beckett was serving in the French underground, this passage underscores the great impact Samuel Johnson had on him. 202 Notes

39. Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 54–5, and esp. p. 105. The quotation from Damrosch which follows is found on p. 59. 40. Cf. Boswell’s “when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters,” and The Unnamable, p. 298: “He emerges as from heavy hangings. . . . He is stooping and seems to be dragging invisible burdens.” 41. ELH 18 (1951): 90–106; reprinted in Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. 42. Rhetoric and Death: the Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 88. 43. Rasselas, in Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale, 1990), pp. 39–40. Boswell connects Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes: “Rasselas, as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ he had so successfully enforced in verse” (Life, Vol. 1, p. 342). 44. Texts for Nothing 9 (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 118. 45. Britannica, 9th edn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1878–89), Vol. 13, p. 730. 46. Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (London: John Lane, 1910), p. 41.

7 Pope, Beckett, and the Aesthetics of Decay

1. “An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot,” lines 125–6, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Subsequent references to Pope’s poems shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text, by line number. 2. The best account of Pope’s various physical ailments is still Marjorie Nicol- son and G. S. Rousseau, “A Medical Case History of Alexander Pope,” in “This Long Disease, My Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 7–82. 3. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press), p. 39B. 4. “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” in Poems, p. 120. See Andrew Ettin, Litera- ture and the Pastoral (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 43, who points out that Pope, like Horace before him and Voltaire after, “knows that existence on a real farm is no idyll except for the gentleman-farmer, and that the pastoral life (as distinct from simply farm life) is reserved for poets’ fantasies and for those wealthy enough to make dreams come true.” 5. University of Dublin, Trinity College, Honor Examination Papers, 1924. Beckett apparently reread “Lycidas” in the 1930s: in his Whoroscope notebook he quotes Milton’s “eyelids of the morn” (line 26), which he records as “eyelids of morning.” 6. Rasselas, p. xix, in The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 368; and The Life of Milton, p. 699. Later in his life, Pope showed his own disdain for the pastoral form; see the allusion to his early poetry in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, lines 147–8: “Soft were my Numbers, who could take offence/While pure Description held the place of Sense?” Notes 203

7. The letter is given in full in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. 1, p. 262. Much later in his life, Beckett quoted the line to David Gullette, as reported in “Mon Jour Chez Sam: a Visit with Beckett,” Ploughshares 1(2) (1972): 67. 8. More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 101. Subsequent references to this collection shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 9. Numerous examples of “legions” are cited by John Arthos, in The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1949; New York: Octagon Books, 1966), pp. 235–7. In addition to Pope’s use of “spangles” cited below, see Robert Herrick, “Corrina’s Going A-Maying,” line 6: “The Dew bespangling Herbe and Tree.” See also the uses of “emerald” cited in the OED, plus “green emerald” in Thomson, “Autumn,” line 155, and the poetical uses of “expanse” and “bright” earlier in this same paragraph. Cf. also Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 37: “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” 10. English Pastoral Poetry (London: G. C. Harrap, 1952), p. 17. Cf. Beckett’s observation in his review titled “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 73: “[Frederick Robert Higgins’] verses have what . . . all modern nature poetry excepting Wordsworth’s has, a good smell of dung, most refreshing after all the attar of far off, most secret and inviolate rose.” 11. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 106. Subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 12. Incidentally, I find no reference to sheep in Hyde Park per se. But cf. Henry C. V. Morton, In Search of London (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951), p. 263: “I remember once falling into a conversation with a foreigner in the Green Park [roughly adjacent to Hyde Park]. . . . ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Sheep are grazing all around us, right in the middle of Piccadilly. It is something, that no one could have imagined or believed. Don’t you call that extraordinary?’ I had to agree that it was.” 13. Pnin (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 156–7. 14. Molloy, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 28. Subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 15. Not that Beckett treats pastoral innocence with too much respect. See The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 316: “Come, my lambkin, join in our gambols, it’s soon over, you’ll see, just time to frolic with a lambkinette. . . . ” The poetical word “lambkin” is used by Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Gay, and Shelley (OED). 16. Dream, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 217. Subsequent references shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 17. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 15. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 17, has pointed 204 Notes

out that the moment captures in words an image caught originally in an actual photograph; thus there is an irony here, for the moment is not so much embalmed in verbena as it is in this photograph. 18. In Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 29. 19. Composed originally in English, From and Abandoned Work is reprinted in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 142. 20. The Beckett Country, pp. xxvi and 346 n. 23. On numerous occasions Beckett makes a distinction between actual sight and the eyes of the imagination, as for example in How It Is, p. 28: “I close my eyes not the blue the others at the back....” 21. Composed originally in English, Stirrings Still is reprinted in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), pp. 123–4. 22. All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 34. Beckett once more jokingly links God to the pastoral; see above. 23. The Poet without a Name: Gray’s “Elegy” and the Problem of History (Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 152. 24. More than 40 years after he departed his native country, the “Irishness” of Beckett’s landscape is still evident. The photographs of the Dublin mountains in O’Brien suggest the Irish inspiration behind Beckett’s setting for Ill Seen. 25. Marjorie Perloff, “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry” (1982), reprinted in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 191–206, convincingly illustrates the poetic attributes of Beckett’s prose in Ill Seen Ill Said. And in “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, pp. 36–48, ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), Perloff goes on to argue that having abandoned his native language and its literary tradition beginning with Molloy, Beckett in his later works returns to that tradition as he translates his original French into English. Although Perloff’s point in this latter essay is a provocative one and although she identifies numerous echoes from the canon of English literature, I cannot accept her premise; my view is that in turning from English to French Beckett never, rather surprisingly, abandoned English literature. 26. For a fuller discussion, see my “Ill Seen Ill Said: Beckett’s Pastoral Elegy,” Postscript 9 (1992): 31–40. 27. J. A. Richardson, in Falling Towers: the Trojan Imagination in “The Waste Land,”“The Dunciad,” and “Speke Parott” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 52. Indeed this reputation dates from the poet’s own day; in the testimonies prefacing the 1928 edition of The Dunciad, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, pp. 326–7, Pope includes one from John Dennis, who had said of The Essay on Criticism that “this youngster had espoused some anti- quated muse.” Cf. A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 13: “Beckett, even at his jauntiest, reads like a man who never had a childhood.” 28. Ill Seen Ill Said (New York: Grove Press, 1981), p. 51; subsequent references to Ill Seen shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. How It Is, where the sheep of the tradition are “like granite” (p. 31) and the crocus is now “in a pot in a basement” (p. 21). Notes 205

29. Cf. Ill Seen, p. 36, where the lamb is said to be “reared for slaughter like the others.” The lamb and the crocus appear within two lines of one another in Pope’s “Spring” (lines 31–3). 30. “Lycidas,” line 125; “The Ruined Cottage,” line 422. 31. Cf. Spenser’s “withered flowers” (The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 8, Stanza 41, line 9); Milton’s “cowslips wan that hang the pensive head” (“Lycidas,” line 147); Pope’s “Ye Flow’rs that droop” (“Autumn,” Pastorals, line 27); George Crabbe’s “yon wither’d leaf” (The Village, line 210); Keats’s “droop- headed flowers” (“Ode to Melancholy,” line 13); and Shelley’s “broken lily” and “withering flower” (“Adonais,” lines 54 and 286). As early as Dream, Beckett had mentioned “tattered flowers” (p. 52), “doomed flowers” (p. 157), and “withered leaves” (p. 188). See also the reference in Murphy, p. 196, to a Hindu who for many years had been writing a monograph entitled The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Kampendonck. 32. It is worth noting that stones in the pastoral tradition have often posed a threat to the sometimes limited vegetation as well as to the safety of the flock. For example, see Virgil, Eclogue I.7: “Happy old man! So these lands will still be yours, and large enough for you, though bare stone cover all, and the marsh chokes your pastures with slimy rushes.” 33. For just two examples, see the following: Thomson, who questions in “Spring”: “Ah, what shall language do? ah, where find words/Tinged with so many colours. . . . ” (lines 475–6); and Crabbe, The Village, who promises: “I paint the cot,/As truth will paint it, and as bards will not” (lines 53–4). It is interesting to note that as an Honors student in Modern Languages at Trinity, Beckett in the Hilary term of 1924 was asked to write on Spenser, one of two possible subjects being this: “Spenser is the greatest painter in words in English literature” (stet.). See University of Dublin, Trinity College, Honor Examination Papers, 1924. 34. “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” line 13. Suggestions of pastoral painting appear early in Beckett’s fiction, as in Dream, p. 129: “He whistled the Roses are Bloom- ing and danced home down the road under the moon, with perhaps a grey- hound or two to set him off, and the dew descending. . . . ” 35. In The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), p. 231. In Murphy, p. 228, Beckett mentions “Trafalgar Square,” clearly meaning the National Gallery; the National Portrait Gallery is right around the corner. See Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 88: “As far as I can judge, most of Beckett’s knowledge of painting and sculpture has been acquired by tramping unweariedly through museums and haunting exhibitions, rather than from the written word.” 36. Cf. Beckett’s letter to Axel Kaun dated 9 July 1937, reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 172: “Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved . . . ?” 37. The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), p. 91. 38. Cf. Pope’s “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” lines 41–4: 206 Notes

Yet still how faint by precept is exprest The living image in the Painter’s breast? Thence endless streams of fair ideas flow, Strike in the sketch, or in the picture glow.

39. Cf. Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 35: “Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placentae.” Both images contrast sharply with the following: “Two Swains, whom Love kept wakeful, and the Muse,/Pour’d o’er the whitening Vale their fleecy Care . . . ” (Pope, “Spring,” lines 18–19); and “In boundless prospect – yonder shagged with wood,/Here rich with harvest, there white with flocks!” (James Thomson, Autumn, lines 658–9). 40. James Knowlson, “Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie White- law,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 3 (Summer 1978): 89. 41. Cf. “Lycidas,” lines 42–3: “The Willows and the Hazel Copses green/Shall now no more be seen.” Certain lines of Goldsmith’s poem are curiously sug- gestive of Beckett’s poetic story: “Bends to the grave with unperceived decay,/While resignation gently slopes the way . . . ” (lines 109–10); “She, wretched matron, forced, in age . . . / To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn” (lines 131–4); and “Could not all/Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!/Obscure it sinks . . . ” (lines 237–9). John Montague, in “A Few Drinks and a Hymn: My Farewell to Samuel Beckett,” New York Times Book Review (17 April 1994), p. 24, reports that the writer mentioned Goldsmith within two weeks of his death. 42. Beckett does something comparable in Enough (1966), reprinted in No’s Knife, p. 159: “Now I’ll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers.” 43. The lines from Pope allude ironically to Matthew 10: 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 709n. 44. “An Interview with Beckett,” reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heri- tage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 148. Cf. p. 28 below. 45. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 62. 46. I rely here on Donald W. Nichol, “Pope’s 1747 Ethic Epistles and the Essay on Man Frontispiece: an Abandoned ‘Opus Magnum’?” in Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Colin Nicholson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Uni- versity Press, 1988), pp. 230–2. Pope’s drawing includes a sarcophagus on which rests a skull adorned with bay, a guttering candle, and an open book of music along with a broken wind-instrument, while nearby is a shattered classical statue, a half-dead tree, a cobweb, and in the background the remains of the Roman Colosseum; in the middle distance is a bearded figure seated on the ground (perhaps the stereotypical poet?), blowing bubbles. 47. Alexander Pope: the Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 159. Hogarth’s illustration was intended as the tailpiece to his collected engravings. 48. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century: 1700–1740 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 545. Notes 207

49. The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s “Essay on Man” (Tusca- loosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 160–2. Subsequent references to Solomon shall be included within my text. 50. “The Preface of 1717,” in Poems, p. xxviii. 51. In borrowing Pope’s phrase for the title of his recent biography of Beckett, of course, Knowlson has tacitly acknowledged the connection between the two writers. Cf. An Essay on Man, Epistle 4, line 284: “See Cromwell, damn’d to everlasting fame!” 52. Malone Dies (New York: Grove Press, 1956), pp. 18–19. 53. On this matter see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: a Life (W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), pp. 292–3. 54. Cf. Pope’s “Autumn,” line 94: “Farewell ye Woods! adieu the Light of Day!” 55. Christopher Ricks discusses this important pun in Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 95. 56. In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1950), lines 1–10. 57. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1974), p. 60. Cf. S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 18: “Embracing the aleatory, he also insists on maintaining considerable conscious control.” 58. Alexander Pope: the Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 318. 59. Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 33. Cf. Pope’s word “unmeaning” in An Essay on Criticism (line 355), and “unwriting” in “Martinus Scriblerus, of the Poem” (The Dunciad Variorum, in Poems, p. 344).

Conclusion

1. Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 57–8. 2. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). It is difficult to be certain about the nature of Joyce’s involvement in the writing of the book, although it was clearly substantial. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn (1959; Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 616. Beckett’s comment on criticism and bookkeeping is to be found in “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” (1929), reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 19; subsequent references to this essay shall appear within my text. 3. See Gilbert, Chapter 14, pp. 294–312. 4. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p.18; cf. p. 29. Subsequent references to this work shall appear within my text. 5. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), p. 12. 6. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 1. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 303: “Ever mur- muring my old stories. . . . Is there really nothing new to try?”; subsequent citations of this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. also Beckett’s review of “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), reprinted in 208 Notes

Disjecta, p. 70: “[T]he younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again. . . . ” 7. Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 32; subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition. 8. Cf. P. J. Murphy, “On First Looking into Beckett’s The Voice,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol, England: The Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 76: “There is indeed ‘hearing other than its own’ – as Keats heard Chapman who heard Homer and as Beckett has heard all of them.” 9. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonomy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 221. 10. Quoted in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 139. 11. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 13. 12. Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: The Viking Press, 1962), pp.182 and 424. 13. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 20. 14. In “A Tale of a Tub,” etc., ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 130. Subsequent quotations shall be to this edition and shall be cited by page number within the text. 15. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). In what follows, I have been particularly influenced by Bate’s Chapter 2: “The Neoclassical Dilemma.” 16. In The Poems of Alexander Pope (one-volume Twickenham text), ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), lines 247–8. Subsequent citations of Pope shall be to this edition and shall be cited within my text. 17. Dunciad Variorum, in Poems, p. 328. See The Spectator, No. 253, in Addison and Steele: Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator,” ed. Robert J. Allen (1957; Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), p. 348. Used for convenience. 18. Burton in these few pages cites Gesner, Scaliger, Jovius, Callimachus, Cardan, Macrobius, Seneca, and many others. For convenience, I have used the excerpts from the Anatomy in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert P. Tristram Coffin and Alexander M. Witherspoon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), pp. 160–1. Subsequent citations of Burton will be to this anthology. 19. The original in Burton reads: “Yea, but you will infer that this is actum agere, an unnecessary work, cramben bis coctam apponere, the same again and again in other words” (p. 60). I am grateful to Mary Bryden for locating the Latin citation in Beckett’s notebook and for supplying the nice translation. 20. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 283. 21. In the word “gloomy” I intend to echo Louis I. Bredvold’s famous essay titled “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists” (1949), reprinted in Eighteenth- Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 3–20. 22. “Imagination Dead Imagine,” in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (1966; London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), pp. 161–4. Notes 209

23. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 4. 24. Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 12. 25. Three Dialogues, in Disjecta, p. 145. 26. In James Joyce: an International Perspective, ed. Suheil Badi Bushrui and Bernard Benstock (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), p. vii. Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 33, 52, 92, 103, emphysema of, 121 194 n.13, 198 n.56 English language, rejection Adams, Robert M., 183 n.47, 199 n.8 of, 17 Addison, Joseph, 5, 12, 14–16, 77, failure, art of, 3 157–8 “footnoting” technique, 22, 24, 41, The Spectator, 162 178 n.51 allusions, 6–7, 21, 173 n.32 formal innovations in eighteenth in Beckett vs. Joyce, 6 century, interest in, 156 density in early vs. reduction in later literary impotence, sense of, 61–3, works, 8, 11 104–6, 145, 151–2, 160 see also Beckett, “‘footnoting’ memory, power of, 11, 21–4 technique” mocking of eighteenth-century Alter, Robert, 67 style, 57 Alvarez, A., 20, 61, 204 n.27 “Mr. Beckett,” in Dream of Fair to Arnold, Matthew, 164 Middling Women, 71 Atherton, James S., 173 n.26, 195 n.19 oxymoronic style, 148–9 Austen, Jane, 16, 18, 47 plagiarism of oneself, 160 Sense and Sensibility, 18, 47, 184 poetic diction, use of, 135 nn.2, 3 as post-Joycean modernist, or postmodernist, 9 Bair, Deirdre, 11, 15–16, 58, 69, 110, puns in, 42–3, 153 112, 171 n.4, 175 n.11, 180 n.9, “Quin,” ur-Watt in MS of Watt, 188 n.49, 191 n.25, 203 n.17 15–16, 48–9 Balzac, Honoré de, 8 “Sam,” character in Watt, 24–5, Barry, James, 127, 201 n.38 40, 49, 117 Barth, John, 47, 67 as satirist, 35, 37 Bate, W. Jackson (“burden of the scholarly vs. creative self, 20–2 past”), 161 slapstick in, 38 Battestin, Martin, 65, 154 as Swiftian misanthropist, 37–8 Beckett, Samuel tragic in, 127 his aesthetics vs. Joyce’s, 145 his “unheroics” (Ellmann), 164 his aesthetics and Pope’s, 132–3 see also language anxiety regarding originality, 158 Beckett, Samuel, works apocalyptic tone in, 153, 163 All That Fall, 49, 64–6, 111, 119–20, combination of ironic and heroic 123, 139, 146, 183 n.45, in, 129 188 n.48 “dialogue” with predecessors, 8–9, “Assumption,” 66 31–2, 96–7, 156–7 The Calmative, 138 disease, life as, 151 Company, 70, 86, 140, 143, dying writers of eighteenth century, 206 n.39 identification with, 156; “Dante...Bruno.Vico... Joyce,” 2, compare Fielding, Johnson, 91, 196 n.34, 207 n.2 and Swift Le Dépeupleur, 37

210 Index 211

Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 7, 148, 158, 176 n.33, 181 n.21, 16–17, 20–2, 30, 55–6, 70–3, 81, 186 nn.23, 24 85, 91, 108, 119, 127, 137–8, Murphy, 4, 7, 22–5, 28, 31–2, 34–5, 158, 173 n.27, 176 n.33, 37, 75–6, 90–1, 112, 126–7, 136, 180 n.13, 181 n.18, 185 n.9, 158, 181 n.17, 182 n.32, 184 186 n.30, 190 n.17, 191 nn.23, n.4, 192 n.31, 205 n.31 24, 193 n.48, 205 nn.31, 34 No’s Knife, 190 n.14 Echo’s Bones, 50, 126 A Piece of Monologue, 118 “The End,” 123 Proust, 10, 12, 16, 158, 177 n.39, Endgame, 49, 67, 111, 119–20, 183 n.50, 194 n.8 123–4, 146, 201 n.35 “Recent Irish Poetry,” 203 n.10, Enough, 44, 206 n.42 207 n.6 Our Exagmination Round his Rough for Radio II, 12–13, 23, 58, 101 Factification for Incamination of “Stirrings Still,” 138–9 Work in Progress, 157 Stories and Texts for Nothing, 102, “The Expelled,” 102 130, 197 n.41 Film, 196 n.33 That Time, 142 Footfalls, 143, 192 n.37 The Unnamable, 8, 21, 49, 52, 57, 64, From an Abandoned Work, 22, 96, 66, 81, 86–8, 90, 98–100, 103–6, 138, 148, 186 n.25 111, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 154, Happy Days, 7, 13, 21, 50, 156, 178 158–9, 163–4, 178 n.53, 183 n.55, 185 nn.11, 19 n.49, 185 n.14, 191 n.22, 197 How It Is, 21, 67, 121, 123, 138, 159, n.37, 198 n.58, 200 n.26, 201 194 n.8, 204 nn.20, 28 nn.33, 34, 202 n.40, 203 n.15, Human Wishes, 12, 25, 111, 114–18, 207 n.6 125, 127 “The Voice,” 23 Ill Seen Ill Said, 132, 140–4, 152–3, Waiting for Godot, 21, 49, 64, 83, 205 n.29 87–8, 91, 99, 133, 146, 148, Imagination Dead Imagine, 85, 163 200 n.21 Krapp’s Last Tape, 31, 111, 201 n.30 “Walking Out,” in More Pricks, 53, The Lost Ones, 37 134–6 “Love and Lethe,” 54 Watt, 8–9, 15, 24–5, 38–46, 48–9, Malone Dies, 4, 8, 25, 31–2, 35, 37, 56, 58–9, 61, 68, 90, 116–18, 49–53, 60, 62–4, 81–3, 91, 96, 120, 125, 146, 179 n.63, 183 98, 100–1, 103–5, 107–9, 111, nn.41, 44, 188 n.52, 192 n.31, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 127–9, 194 n.4, 195 n.25, 201 n.38 150–1, 158, 163, 186 n.20, 188 “A Wet Night,” in More Pricks, 22, n.44, 194 n.10, 197 nn.39, 44, 48, 53, 73, 137–8 48, 201 nn.33, 34 “What a Misfortune,” in More Mercier and Camier, 48–9, 181 n.28, Pricks, 57 184 n.6 “what is the word,” in As the Story Molloy, 8, 50–1, 64, 81–4, 90, was Told, 108–9 96, 100–1, 103, 111, 119–20, Whoroscope notebook, 4, 10, 18, 20, 125, 127, 136–7, 152, 158–9, 28, 47–8, 53, 99, 111, 133, 151, 163, 183 n.42, 197 n.46, 172 n.16, 178 n.54, 186 n.20, 198 n.55 196 n.32, 199 n.9, 202 n.5 More Pricks Than Kicks, 3, 6–7, 13, Worstward Ho, 86, 108, 188 n.50 18, 21–2, 24, 28–31, 47, 50, 53, Bedlam (Bethlehem Royal Hospital), 56–7, 73–5, 126–7, 134, 136–7, 34–7, 181 n.26, 182 n.31 212 Index

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 111, 175 n.9 Cohen, David, 23 Berkeley, George, 2–3, 11–12, 17, 28, Cohn, Ruby, 110–11, 199 n.15 39, 92, 111, 199 n.7 Collins, John Churton, 94–5, 198 n.55 Commonplace Book, 17, 194 n.11 Congreve, William, 14 Siris, 98 Cooldrinagh, 138–9 Blake, William, 16, 67 Crabbe, George, 205 nn.31, 33 Bloom, Harold, 1, 4, 8, 27 Craik, Henry, 94–7, 100, 178 n.60, Boswell, James, 3, 19, 110–11, 114–15, 198 n.55 117–18, 120, 122–5, 128–9, 177 Crocker, Lester G., 5 n.43, 194 n.11, 201 n.35, 202 n.40 Cross, Wilbur L., 98–100, 102, allusion to, in Murphy, 19, 24 197 n.40 Beckett’s use of Boswellian word Culler, Jonathan, 79 “company,” 123 Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 18 Damrosch, Leopold, 77, 127–8 Life of Johnson, 5, 7, 18, 24–5, Dante, 3, 8 111–12, 114–15, 118–19, death, theme of 122–5, 127–8, 178 nn.61, 62, in From an Abandoned Work, 96 194 n.11, 201 n.32 in Malone Dies, 100 Brater, Enoch, 20, 196 n.36 see also Fielding, Pope, Johnson, Broadley, A. M., 112, 131 Sterne, and Swift Bronson, Bertrand, 129 Defoe, Daniel, 2, 18, 49–52, 67, 159, Brower, Reuben, 154 177 n.36 Bryden, Mary, 8, 200 n.16, 208 n.19 in Beckett’ s “Serena I,” 50, 177 n.36 Bucknill, J. C., 95 Robinson Crusoe, 18, 47, 49–53, 185 Burke, Edmund, 92, 157 nn.11, 19 Burton, Robert, 162, 193 n.43, Descartes, René, 3 208 nn.18, 19 Dew, Miss Rosie, and the pastoral Byrd, Max, 103–4 tradition, 136 Byron, Lord, 16, 176 n.30 “diary-fiction” (H. Porter Abbott), in Defoe and Beckett, 52 Calder, John, 11, 174 n.3 Dickens, Charles, 16, 164 “Captain Shaw’s List of Students with Oliver Twist, 72 Distinctions, 1924–31,” 175 n.21 Dictionary of National Biography, Cash, Arthur H., 103 Beckett’ s use of, 112 Cazamian, Louis, 130, 176 n.23, Diderot, Denis, 17, 54 198 n.5, 200 n.25 disease and eighteenth-century Cervantes, Miguel de, 107 writers, see Fielding, Johnson, Don Quixote, 97, 101 Pope, and Swift Persiles y Sigismunda, 97 Dobrée, Bonamy, 147–8 chain of being, Beckett’ s inversion Dobson, Austin, Vignettes of the of, 145–6 Eighteenth Century, 97, 100 Chaplin, Charlie, 40, 164 Doherty, Francis, 38, 180 n.8, Chaucer, Geoffrey, 14, 16 182 n.36, 200 n.20 Chesterfield, Lord, 5, 7, 12, 19, 134, Donoghue, Denis, 27 158, 177 n.43, 200 n.20 Dryden, John, 13–15 Cibber, Colley, 152, 161 Dublin University Calendar, 11, 174 n.4 Cioran, E. M., 177 n.47, 179 n.4 Coe, Richard N., 177 n.34 École Normale Supérieure, 16 Coetzee, J. M., 48, 184 n.7 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 27, 93, 184 n.51 Index 213

Eliot, T. S., 1–2, 16 Gray, Thomas, 13, 20, 159, 178 n.55 Ellmann, Richard, 8, 17, 90, 96, 145, “Elegy Written in a Country 164, 206 n.43 Churchyard,” 12, 140 Greenblatt, Stephen J., 1 Farquhar, George, 18, 177 n.41 Gullette, David, 175 n.14, 203 n.7 Federman, Raymond, 40–1 Fielding, Henry, 3–5, 8–9, 12, 17, 49, Hardy, Thomas, 24 53–7, 61, 67, 86–8, 99–101, 159, Harries, Elizabeth W., 63 161, 177 n.36, 186 n.29 Harvey, Lawrence E., 50, 188 n.54, building up and tearing down of 197 n.50 “show,” 55–6 Hawkins, John, 112, 116, 124–5, 199 experimentation of form in, 156 n.14, 201 n.36 image of dying writer in, 92, Heidegger, Martin, 3 98–100, 104, 107–8 Hogarth, William, 54, 186 nn.26, 27, as literary optimist, 163 200 n.26 “perhaps” and hesitating rhetoric in “The Bathos,” 147 Fielding and Beckett, 55–7 Harlot’ s Progress, 54 visual arts, allusions to, 54 Hone, Joseph, 17, 29, 94–5, 114, 119, writing as living in, 66 180 n.10, 196 n.32 Fielding, Henry, works Horace, 154 Amelia, 18, 177 n.40 Hunter, J. Paul, 51, 82, 182 n.37, Jonathan Wild, 18, 47, 53, 68, 184 185 n.17 n.3, 192 n.32 Hyde Park, in Molloy, 136, Joseph Andrews, 17–18, 47, 49, 53–4, 203 n.12 68, 74, 76, 187 n.32 Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 18, “influence,” vs. “affinity,” 3–4 47, 53, 92, 97–100, 184 n.3, Beckett’s use of term, 2–3 196 n.31 as dialogue, 2 Tom Jones, 7, 12, 17–18, 47, 49, Ireland, nostalgic image of, 138–9, 53–7, 61, 66, 68, 70, 74, 78, 87, 204 n.24 184 n.3, 186 n.26 Iser, Wolfgang, 68, 73, 85, 189 nn.5, 6, Fish, Stanley, 89 191 n.22 Fletcher, John, 4, 40, 50, 58, 69, “gaps” or “blanks” in text, 72–3, 179 n.3, 184 n.7 191 n.22 Foucault, Michel, 35, 42, 44–5 mock intimacy described, 77–8 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 63 Johnson, Samuel, 3–5, 8–9, 20, 90 Garrick, David, 80 arithmetic, fondness for, 122–4, Gay, John, 18 201 n.32 Geulincz, Arnold, 3 asthma, gout, and dropsy, 112, Gibbon, Edward, 3, 5, 157 119–20 Gide, André, 21 Beckett’ s identification with, 111, Gilbert, Stuart, 157 115–16 Goldsmith, Oliver, 5, 12, 28, 92 Beckett’ s “Johnson fantasy,” 110ff., “The Deserted Village,” 143, 198 n.2 206 n.4 Beckett’ s visit to Johnson’s The Vicar of Wakefield, 17–18, 47 birthplace, 111–12 Gontarski, S. E., 26, 173 n.33, 185 his conversation as escape from n.16, 189 n.6, 207 n.57 “vile melancholy,” 122 214 Index

Johnson, Samuel – continued links Beckett and Swift, 28 and deterioration, and depression of near-blindness, 119 Beckett’ s characters, 111, 115, “tamed” the literary voices in his 118–22, 124–6, 134 head whereas Beckett could not, fear of death or annihilation, 115, 158–9 120, 123–4 “telescopic eye” vs. Beckett’ s impotence, Beckett’ s theory of, “microscopic eye,” 145 113–15 Joyce, James, works as inspiration to Beckett, 12, 111, Dubliners, 80 126–7 Finnegans Wake, 6–7, 28, 67, 69, as “novelistic figure,” 118 91, 94, 99, 157, 160, 162, opium and laudanum, and Beckett’s 173 n.26, 190 n.7, 191 n.24, characters, 125–6 193 n.2, 201 n.32 self-consciousness, 122 “Twilight of Blindness,” 94 solitariness, 121 Ulysses, 68, 102, 111, 157, 171 n.5, stroke of, 123–4 199 n.8, 203 n.9 as “tragic figure,” 115–16, 127–8 Jung, Carl, 66 walking, awkwardness of, 119, 126, Juvenal, 130 128, 202 n.40 Johnson, Samuel, works Keaton, Buster, 38 Aegri Ephemeris, 114 Keats, John, 16, 23, 139, 205 n.31 Annals, 119, 201 n.30 Kelly, Lionel, 200 n.30 Dictionary of the English Language, Kenner, Hugh, 4, 41, 67, 182 n.39 111, 198 n.58, 199 n.9 Kermode, Frank, 135 The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, Knowlson, James, 12, 21, 25, 69, 18, 111 111–12, 173 n.30, 174 n.3, 176 “Letter to Lord Chesterfield,” 12, n.23, 180 n.9, 185 nn.11, 19, 200 n.20 207 n.51 The Lives of the English Poets, 18, 111 Korshin, Paul, 116 Prayers and Meditations, 119, 127 Kristeva, Julia, 160 Rasselas, 18, 127, 130, 134, 164, 196 n.31, 202 n.43 language: lack of linguistic confidence “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” in Ill Seen Ill Said, 143–4 110, 117, 130, 202 n.43 failure of in Sterne, 61–4 Joyce, James, 2–6, 8–9, 27, 61, 65, 68, failure of in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub 145, 156–7, 159 and Beckett’s Watt, 40–3 aesthetics of, 133, 163–4 and Pope’s “aesthetics of decay,” allusive technique, 8, 156–7 133, 144–5 Beckett not his “apprentice,” 55, Legouis, Émile, and Louis Cazamian, 163 176 n.23, 198 n.5, 200 n.25 Beckett escapes the shadow of, 159 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 3, 186 n.20 Beckett his “legitimate and Malone Dies, 52 descendant,” 27 Leslie, Shane, 94–5, 181 n.18 Beckett’ s respect for Joyce’ s work literary heritage and heroism, 164 Joyce’s vs. Beckett’s view of, fascination with Swift and Sterne, 156 160–1, 163 image of dying Joyce, 108 and optimism of Thackeray, influence of eighteenth-century Dickens, Arnold, and writers through him, 156–7 Fielding, 164 Index 215

Pope’ s view of, 161–2 Pagliaro, Harold E., 98 Swift’ s view, 160 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Lodge, David, 160 Verse, 14 Luce, A. A., 2, 11–13, 15, Pancoast, Henry S., 176 n.23 175 nn.18, 20 pastoral tradition, 139–41 All That Fall reflects, 139 Macaulay, Thomas, 131 Beckett echoes Pope’ s use of, 132–7, MacGreevy, Thomas, 4, 10, 16, 19, 26, 144 29, 47, 53–4, 58, 64, 90, 95, Ill Seen Ill Said as pastoral elegy, 111–16, 126, 150, 157, 175 n.15, 139–44 177 n.36, 184 n.3, 186 n.28 Molloy, Pope’s Essay on Man, and Macpherson, James, 13 the escape into the world of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, 25, pastoral, 136–7 32, 35 More Pricks and the conventional Malebranche, Nicolas, 2 landscape of, 134–5 Manning, Mary, 112–14, 119, 126 Murphy and withdrawal into the Marlowe, Christopher, 16 “green old days,” 136 Marvell, Andrew, 139 pastoral nostalgia in The Calmative, Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 11, 57 From an Abandoned Work, and Mays, J. C. C., 34 Stirrings Still, 138 McDowell, R. B. and Webb, D. A., the “young pastoralist” in Dream of 174 n.9, 175 n. 11 Fair to Middling Women, 137–8 McKeon, Michael, 57, 187 n.32 Patch, Thomas, 197 n.44 Mercier, Vivian, 4, 172 n.10, 205 n.35 Perloff, Marjorie, 17, 174 n.2, 204 n.25 Milton, John, 14, 16, 53–4, 142, 146, Picasso, Pablo, 55–6, 68 176 n.26, 186 n.25 Pilling, John, 3, 11, 18, 20, 48, 188 n.49 “Lycidas,” 134, 140, 202 n.5, 205 Pinter, Harold, 60 n.31, 206 n.41 Pirandello, Luigi, 97 Paradise Lost, 12, 53; compare 153 Pope, Alexander, 3–4, 9, 12, 15–16, More, Sir Thomas, 176 n.26 69, 154–5, 158, 162–4, 177 n.43, Morris, David B., 147 183 n.49 Muir, Edwin, 3 Beckett’ s explicit allusions to, Murphy, P. J., 23, 173 n.21, 208 n.8 19, 158 Beckett’ s reading of, 14–16 Nabokov, Vladimir, 136 Beckett’ s sense of a falling off from National Portrait Gallery (London), the age of Pope, 154 142, 205 n.35 death, view of, 149–50 Nelson, Daniel W., 73–4 dependency on the past, 163 New, Melvyn, 2 diminished man in, 147 nothingness, theme in Watt experimentation with form, 156 and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and the Golden Age, 134–6, 153–4 102–3 the impossibility of the new, 163 and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, 43–6 and literary pilfering, 161 as pastoral poet, 142 O’ Brien, Eoin, 138, 180 n.8 and “the Sister-arts” (poetry and O’ Neill, Chris, 183 n.43 painting), 142 Ong, Walter J., 77, 81 style of, 132, 148–9 oxymorons, in Pope and and Trinity Honors Examination, 14 Beckett, 149 “uncreating” (The Dunciad), 163 216 Index

Pope, Alexander, works “curious reader” in Swift and “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” 133 Beckett, 75 The Dunciad, 18, 53, 67, 133, 145–6, direct addresses to, 69–70, 73–4, 151–3, 155, 161–3, 177 n.39, 78–9, 81–2 207 n.59 entrapment of, 68–9, 78–80, 83–5 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Fielding’s reader, 68, 70, 74–7, Lady, 140, 142, 150, 177 n.39 192 n.37 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 12, 132–3, gaze of Beckett’ s reader as source of 149–51, 164, 202 n.6 discomfort, 141 “Epistle to a Lady,” 143 “gentle reader” of eighteenth “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” 142, century, 71 205 n.38 goading by narrator in Tristram Essay on Criticism, 14, 18, 133, 144, Shandy and Malone Dies, 80–3 151–2, 161–2, 189 n.59, 204 intimacy and mock intimacy in n.27, 207 n.59 eighteenth-century texts, 81 Essay on Man, 12, 133, 137, 144–9, mocking and remaking of reader, 207 n.51 69–72, 74–5, 88 Pastorals, 18–19, 132–3, 135, reading as “rhetorical game,” 72–3, 139–41, 205 n.31, 206 n.39 76–7, 86 Poetical Works, 132–3, 145, 150 role, difficult or ambiguous, 70–3, “Preface” to Works, 148 81–3, 84–5 The Rape of the Lock, 12, 14, 18, 150 text invites a particular response The Second Epistle of the Second Book from, 70 of Horace Imitated, 150 Reading University, 114 “On Solitude,” 140 Reason, Age of, 5, 35 The Temple of Fame, 150 Reavey, George, 110, 113, 116 Windsor Forest, 149–50, 154, 161 Rexroth, Kenneth, 3 Portrane Lunatic Asylum, 29 Richardson, Samuel, 13, 18, 33, 52, postmodernism, 49, 55, 105, 160, 163 186 n.21 Pound, Ezra, 53 Clarissa, 33 Poussin, Nicolas, 140 Pamela, 33 Prentice, Charles, 75 Ricks, Christopher, 58, 91, Preston, John, 88 194 nn.7, 9, 195 n.21, 207 n.55 Probyn, Clive T., 60, 77 Rolleston, Sir Humphry, 114 Proust, Marcel, 2, 70 Rossi, Mario, 95, 180 n.10 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 176 n.25 Quin, James (Beckett’ s persona in Ruskin, John, 16 Watt manuscript), 15–16 Salomon, Harry M., 148 Rabelais, François, 4 Sartiliot, Claudette, 160 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 177 n.41, 200 n.20 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 63 Rawson, C. J., 27 Schlack, Beverly Ann, 172 n.19, 173 n.32 reader Schleifer, Ronald, 130 Beckett’ s implicit compliment Schneider, Michel, 8 to, 88 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3 Beckett’ s passive–aggressive Seccombe, Thomas, 112, 131 relationship with, 77 Shadwell, Thomas, 16 characterized in Swift, Fielding, and Shakespeare, William, 12, 14–16, 87, Sterne, 73–8 101, 176 nn.24, 26 Index 217

Shaw, T. B., 175 n.13 Sterne, Laurence, works Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 47, 184 n.4 The Journal to Eliza, 106–8, 197 n.51 Shelley, Percy B., 205 n.31 A Sentimental Journey, 47, 49–50, Shenker, Israel, 145 58–9, 65, 92, 102, 188 n.50 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The School Tristram Shandy, 4, 12–13, 23, 47, for Scandal, 18, 177 n.41 49–50, 57–66, 68, 70, 78–80, Sidney, Sir Philip, 14 101–7, 188 nn.44, 48 Simpson, K. G., 56 Works, 58 Smith, Sir William, Specimens of Stevenson, Robert Louis, 72 English Literature, 12–13, 190 n.15 Stravinsky, Igor, 68 Smollett, Tobias, 2 Swift, Jonathan, 3–9, 13, 91, character “Watt” or “Wat” in, 48 157, 163 Humphry Clinker, 18, 47–9, 91, Beckett’ s allusions to, 12, 16–19, 182 n.34, 185 n.9 26, 30–1, 34–7, 71–2, 158, 177 melancholy invalids in, 48–9 n.36, 180 n.12, 180 n.17 Quin, James (the ur-Watt) in, 48 Beckett “in dialogue with” or Solomon, Harry M., 148–9 identifies with, 31, 96–7, 156 Spenser, Edmund, 14, 16, 139, 142, Beckett’ s interest in Swift’s 176 n.26, 205 n.31 biography, 6–7, 13 Starkie, Walter Fitzwilliam, 97, 195 n.29 Beckett’ s “modern” interpretation Steele, Peter, 105, 197 n.40 of, 9, 93–5 Steele, Richard, 157 Beckett’ s reading of Swift at Trinity Stein, Gertrude, 68 and after, 12–19, 93 “Stella” (Swift’s friend Esther Beckett as Swiftian misanthropist, Johnson), 6–7, 28, 30, 32 37–8 Stendahl, 158 Beckett’ s Swift vs. Yeats’s Swift, Stephen, Leslie, 94, 112, 178 n.60, Joyce’s Swift, 93–4 198 n.55 as character in “Sanies I,” 29 Sterne, Laurence, 2–5, 8–9, 18, 20, 49, “chief end . . . to vex the world,” 69 58–63, 67, 159, 186 n.29, 187 fed Beckett’ s creativity, 93–4, 156, n.36, 188 n.49 159–60 “aesthetics of the fragmentary and formal experimentation in, 156 unfinished,” 63; compare image of the dying Swift, 24, 92–4, 191 n.22 96–7, 104, 108–9 beast of burden in Sterne and “Lemuel,” character in Malone Dies, Beckett, 63–4 32, 35–7 Beckett “an important heir of” mathematics in Watt and A Tale of a (Christopher Ricks), 58, 161 Tub, 43 courage of last days, 92, 103–4, 108 Ménière’s syndrome (Swift’s cultural recycling in, 161–3 disease), 95 death, theme of, 101–4 and the “prisons of the self” literary experimentation, 107, 156 (C. J. Rawson), 27 medical problems of, 64, 66, 101–4 “Presto,” Swift’s nickname for music and painting in, 63 himself in More Pricks, 32 quotation marks, lack of, 80 puns in, 42–3, 153 silence in advance of the moderns, reading Swift as if he were Samuel interest in, 65 Beckett, 27 view of life as “Beckettian,” 63–5, 104 “Wat” or “Watt” in the Holyhead writing as living, 66 Journal, 38, 182 n.34 218 Index

Swift, Jonathan, works Beckett’ s thorough academic Battle of the Books, 12, 159–60, preparation at, 20, 132 183 n.41 Beckett’ s Honors in English, 10, Bickerstaff Papers, 18, 28 13–16 Drapier’ s Letters, 14–15, 18, 28, Beckett’ s Honors in Modern 31, 34 Literature (French and Italian), Gulliver’ s Travels, 6, 17–19, 28, 8, 11, 13–16, 47, 97, 202 n.5, 30–1, 35–7, 68, 71–2, 74–6, 205 nn.5, 33 85, 108, 163, 173 nn.27, 28, 1923 Entrance Examination, 12–13, 176 n. 33, 180 nn.13, 14, 59, 144–5, 159–60, 175 n.11, 181 n.19, 195 n.21 188 n.46 Holyhead Journal, 38 Examination Papers, 12–13, 174 n.9, Journal to Stella, 5–7, 18, 28, 202 n.5, 205 n.33 30–8, 106, 181 nn.20, 26, Honors vs. Ordinary Examinations, 193 n.42 14, 27, 175 nn.19–21, Mechanical Operation of the 176 nn.24, 25 Spirit, 36 MA in Modern Literature, 11 A Modest Proposal, 37 post-Trinity reading of A Tale of a Tub, 4, 6, 18, 25, 28, eighteenth-century literature, 17 34–6, 38–46, 61, 71–4, 76, 103, “the Unadversity of Dublin,” 20 160, 179 n.68, 180 n.13, University Calendar, 11, 13–14, 183 nn.41, 42, 190 n.18 174 n.4, 175 nn.20, 21, “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” 176 nn.22, 23 194 n.7 On the Trinity, 46 “Vanessa” (Swift’ s friend Esther A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties Vanhomrigh), 6 of the Mind, 46, 184 n.51 Van Velde, Bram, 164 “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” Vico, Giambattista, 91 12, 28, 108 Victorianism, 5, 164 “When I come to be old,” 108 Vigny, Alfred de, 58 Virgil, 8, 139, 154, 205 n.32 Thackeray, William M., 164 Voigt, Milton, 195 n.20 Theocritus, 139 Vulliamy, C. E., 112–13, 118, 121 Thompson, Alexander H., History of English Literature, 12, 47, Walpole, Horace, 157 175 n.12, 176 n.23, 186 n.21 Warner, John M., 2, 171 n.5 Thompson, Geoffrey, 34 Watkins, W. B. C., 128 Thomson, James, 142, 203 n.9, Weinfield, Henry, 139 205 n.33, 206 n.39 Whitelaw, Billie, 143 Thrale, Hester Lynch (Piozzi), 112–16, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3 118, 182 n.33 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 8, 65, 92, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 172 nn.17, 20, 182 n.28, 112, 122, 201 n.31 184 n.2 Tindall, William York, 4 The Common Reader, 199 n.15 Trench, Wilbraham F., 176 n.25 “Dr. Burney’ s Evening Party,” 5 Trinity College Dublin, 2–4, 8, 10–21, Orlando: a Biography, 5, 94, 26, 28–9, 47, 93, 97, 101, 130, 199 n.15 174 n.9, 175 nn.10, 12, 13, 18, on Sterne’ s A Sentimental Journey, 176 nn.23, 24 194 n.12 Index 219

Wordsworth, William, 16, and Walter H. Low, Intermediate 140–1 Textbook of English Literature, 14, Wyatt, A. J. 176 n.23 and A. S. Collins, Intermediate Textbook of English Literature, Yeats, W. B., 92–3, 154 176 n.23 Young, Edward, 19