Belacqua Revididus Beckett’s short story ‘Echo’s Bones’

Mark Nixon

IN SEPTEMBER 1933, THE PUBLISHERS CHATTO & WINDUS AGREED TO publish Beckett’s collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks. Writing to Beckett, Chatto’s editor Charles Prentice asked Beckett whether the title could be changed – it was called Draff at the time – and whether he could possibly add a further story to extend the book’s length. Beckett agreed, and proceeded to write the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’. By the tenth of November, the story was on Prentice’s desk. However, on the 13th, Prentice wrote to Beckett saying that the story ‘is a nightmare. Just too terribly persuasive. It gives me the jim-jams’ (qtd. in Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 172- 73). He politely turned down the story, believing it would ‘lose the book a great many readers’, and proposed to publish More Pricks in the form originally submitted. Beckett’s response to this rejection does not survive, but appears to have been understanding. The writing of ‘Echo’s Bones’ had caused many problems for Beckett, not least as he had killed off the protagonist of the stories, Belacqua, in the story ‘Draff’, which in the originally submitted, and now published version, is the last story of the collection.

MARK NIXON is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading, where he is also the Director of the Beckett International Foundation. He is an editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and the Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He has published widely on Beckett’s work, and has recently prepared, for Faber & Faber, an edition of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing and Other Short Prose 1950-1976 (2010). He is currently editing a book entitled Publishing Samuel Beckett (British Library, 2011) and working on Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge UP, 2011) with Dirk Van Hulle. His monograph Samuel Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’ will be published by Continuum (2011), and his critical edition of Beckett’s unpublished short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ is appearing with Faber & Faber in 2011. Nixon | Belacqua Revididus

As a result of this episode, the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, which of course is not to be confused with the poem and 1935 collection of poems of the same title, remained unpublished. However, this little known text, and missing link in Beckett’s development as a writer, will finally be published in 2011 by Faber & Faber in a critical edition.1

‘Echo’s Bones’ survives in 2 typescripts. Beckett gave one copy to his friend A.J. Leventhal, and it is now in the Leventhal collection at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. The other copy was given to Laurence Harvey and is now at Dartmouth College Library. The two typescripts are identical, but the marginal manuscript corrections differ, suggesting that they were corrected at different times. Due to its inaccessibility, the story has received scant critical attention.2 As such it belongs to what Stan Gontarski has termed Beckett’s ‘grey canon’ a text that is as much present as it is absent from the oeuvre. This spectral existence, and the very nature of the text and the context in which it arose and disappeared, causes several interpretative problems. The first problem is to decide whether to discuss it in isolation, or as a part of More Pricks than Kicks, as it was originally intended. Just as the collection More Pricks was partially created from the textual detritus of the unpublished first novel Dream, ‘Echo’s Bones’, as we shall see, constitutes a nexus of intratextual and intertextual references, a textual network which implicates several of Beckett’s other texts from the 1930s. Beckett, for example, used several ideas, characters and quotations from the unpublished text in Murphy. As such, its unpublished status marks an absence that diminishes, so to speak, the completeness of the other texts.

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As the text is unfamiliar to many readers, a short summary may be useful. The story refers to itself as ‘a fagpiece’ and a ‘triptych’, and it is indeed a piece in three movements, whereby the three parts only barely make up a whole. It begins with Belacqua returned from the dead, sitting on a fence and smoking cigars. This first part tells the story of his resurrection, and his encounter with the prostitute Miss Zaborovna Privet. Having been ravished by her over garlic and Cuban rum, Belacqua is returned to his fence. The second part tells the story of Lord Gall of Wormwood, a large, even giant, estate owner who sweeps Belacqua up and takes him to his tree house. A fantastical and rather Swiftian dialogue ensues, during which it transpires that Gall is unable to father a son and secure the future of his estate. He fears the overtures made on Lady Moll Gall by the fertile Baron Extravas, who will inherit the estate should Gall die intestate. He thus requests that Belacqua help to make him a father. Belacqua, having weighed up the pros and cons of this request, complies, and Moll does indeed give birth – but to a girl. The story then switches abruptly to Belacqua sitting on the headstone of his grave, watching the groundsman Doyle, who had already featured in the story ‘Draff’ of More Pricks than Kicks, rob his grave. Doyle believes that Belacqua is a ghost, but getting increasingly drunk relies on him to succeed in his task. They finally open the coffin only to find stones, rather than Belacqua’s body, and the story ends with one of Beckett’s favourite quotations, from the Brothers Grimm, ‘So it goes in the world’.

If the story itself is somewhat spectral, then so is its protagonist Belacqua. In complying with Prentice’s request for an additional story, Beckett must have decided that it was easier to resurrect Belacqua from the dead and to add a story at the end of the collection than to upset the unity, if there is

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one, of More Pricks by inserting one at an earlier point. The general themes of life and death, and the motif of resurrection, are pervasive – the story thus twice refers to the ‘womb-tomb’ or ‘womby-tomby’ conundrum explored in Beckett’s post-war texts. In terms of the theme of resurrection, there are several Biblical references, including one to the immaculate conception. Beckett must have pointed the topic of resurrection out to Prentice, for in a letter dated 4th October 1933, the latter refers to Belacqua as Lazarus.

The first page of the text introduces the fact that Belacqua walks again, or rather has come back from the dead and is now sitting on a fence: ‘To state it then fairly fully once and for all, Belacqua is a human, dead and buried, restored to the jungle, yes really restored to the jungle’ (‘Echo’s Bones’ [hereafter EB], 1; qtd. in Campbell, 454). Belacqua, however, does not feel alive, but rather weary, and wonders ‘if his lifeless condition were not all a dream and if on the whole he had not been a great deal deader before than after his formal departure, so to speak, from among the quick’ (ibid.). The threshold between life and death is inscribed in the text by Belacqua’s opening position on the fence, which is reinforced by the figure of the prostitute Zaborovna Privet. Both her Russian name and her second name indicate a border, a shrub in this case, which is reinforced by Belacqua’s statement that she ‘hedges’. That Belacqua has not been returned from the dead intact is further evident from the fact that he has no shadow (a detail taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy).

Throughout the story, Beckett uses Belacqua’s resurrected status for a discussion of the nature of existence, and the generally deplorable state of being in the world – both familiar Beckettian topics. Thus Belacqua refers to

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being back in ‘the dust of the world’, back in the ‘jungle’, and refutes the notion that ‘the debt of nature […] can no more be discharged by the mere fact of kicking the bucket than descent can be made into the same stream twice’ (EB, 1; qtd. in Ackerley, 110) – the last phrase of course a quotation from Heraclitus. The fact that he has been thrown back into the world troubles Belacqua, and cause him to wonder whether he would have returned had he been cremated rather than buried.

Yet Belacqua’s journey to death and back, with all its Dantean connotations, has not given him any metaphysical or religious insights. In an exchange with the Zaborovna, who questions him on the existence of God, Belacqua states clearly that he knows no more than he did before.

Belacqua’s ghostly, incomplete presence on earth in ‘Echo’s Bones’ is evident from the third part of the story, which introduces the groundsman Doyle as he attempts to rob Belacqua’s grave. As the narrator reminds us, Doyle was the nameless gardener in the story ‘Draff’. Doyle strenuously tries to ignore Belacqua, who sits upon his own headstone. Belacqua tries to convince Doyle of his physical presence by spitting in his eye, and endeavours to tell the groundsman that his attempt to rob his grave is doomed to fail as, well, he is not yet in the grave. Doyle, increasingly inebriated, oscillates between sublime philosophical insights (such as his disposition on the difference between natural and spiritual bodies), and a general deterioration of control over the situation.

Yet Doyle is not the only character Beckett introduces into the story to maintain a sense of continuity between ‘Echo’s Bones’ and the other stories

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of More Pricks. Indeed, there is a proliferation of characters who, at three points of the story, pass by in the background. Thus, for example, the Parambini and Caleken Frika make an appearance. Moreover, the Alba, Belacqua’s idealised love, surfaces in the most surreal way, twice in the text, in a submarine, of all things, which is visible off-shore. The bizarre introduction of these characters, who add nothing to the actual plot, or rather plots, of the story, was presumably one of the reasons why Prentice turned it down. In his rejection letter cited above, he refers to the ‘wild unfathomable energy of the population.’

The spectral nature of the text, and the topic of resurrection, is reinforced by its insistent use of intertextuality. There is hardly a sentence in ‘Echo’s Bones’ that does not include an intertextual reference. These references are both extremely erudite and at the same time surprisingly contemporary and popular, and are inscribed in the text both covertly and overtly. In particular, ‘Echo’s Bones’ continues to draw on Beckett’s reading in general, and his Dream notebook in particular. Indeed, one could say that Beckett used those quotations from the Dream notebook that he had not previously used in the novel of the same name or in More Pricks, and some are repeated from those earlier texts. On the whole, ‘Echo’s Bones’ is more closely connected, in style and method, to Dream than to More Pricks. One of the main sources for ‘Echo’s Bones’, for example, is St. Augustine’s Confessions. Thus Beckett’s erudite use of Augustine is Lord Gall’s insistence on calling Belacqua ‘Adeodatus’, meaning ‘by God given’, the name St Augustine gave to his son. Beckett is here drawing on his notes on St Augustine’s life and work, now kept at Trinity College Dublin. Other literary and erudite

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references include ones to Chaucer, Byron, Rimbaud, Goethe and Darwin, to name but a few.

This learned use of allusions and intertextual references is signposted by the overtly self-referential use of footnotes, evident for example when Beckett cites Shakespeare’s Richard III. Indeed, whereas many quotations are obscured beneath the text’s surface, others are openly flaunted, replicating a strategy generally applied in the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. This overt intertextuality is evident, for example, in the line ‘Portions of a poem by Uhland came into his mind’ (qtd. with permission in Nixon 2006a, 279). Furthermore, although the text predominantly uses erudite references, it also employs more contemporary sources. Thus for example Marlene Dietrich is mentioned, and a political awareness, somewhat surprising considering the time at which ‘Echo’s Bones’ was written, is evident from the reference to the ‘Nazi with his head in a clamp’ (qtd. with permission in Nixon 2009, 33). If the text contains many intertextual allusions, it also reveals Beckett’s use of intratextual references. Beyond its self-conscious allusion to other texts making up More Pricks, there are several references to creative projects that were never completed. This explains the appearance of cows in the text. Beckett took a set of notes on cows, and these survive,3 although it is unclear what he proposed to actually do with them. ‘Echo’s Bones’ is the only text which uses these notes extensively, with references to the Galloway cow, and ‘Rinderpest’ (mad cow disease).

Beckett’s intertextual and intratextual references make ‘Echo’s Bones’ a profoundly unsettling reading experience. Indeed, the compositional method governing ‘Echo’s Bones’ is the same that informed the novel Dream. The

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abrupt switches between the three parts of the story, as well as the erudite and contemporary references, are chaotic, and this effect is further heightened by switches in register in the style of writing. In many ways Beckett here mocks both the modernist, self-referential style of writing as much as the stylised writing of Homeric or Romantic prose and poetry. This style, which also pervades Dream, is played out against a backdrop of humour, as in the episode when Lord Gall’s mode of transport – in the form of an ostrich – is introduced. Playing on the German word for an ostrich, and the composer of the same name, Lord Gall’s ostrich is called ‘Strauss’. It is undoubtedly this insistent switch of register and the wild mixture of intertextual references from contemporary and erudite sources that Prentice objected to in his letter of rejection, when he stated that the story contained ‘horrible and immediate switches of the focus’.

If we set the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ into context with Beckett’s development as a writer, we can say that it is very much part of a creative strategy evident in Dream. That is to say, it is very Joycean, in its densely intertextual nature, self-awareness and fragmentation. Indeed, the story is stylistically more similar to Dream, which remained unpublished until 1992, than to More Pricks, which represented Beckett’s conscious effort to diminish his experimental style of writing in order to get published. A letter to MacGreevy, written in December 1933 after Prentice had rejected the story, hints at this: ‘I haven’t been doing anything. Charles’s fouting à la porte of Echo’s Bones, the last story, into which I had put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of’ (qtd. in Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 171). Beckett’s confession that he included in the story ‘all I knew’ attests to the sense that he had used the compositional process to get rid of all the literary sources he

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had been accumulating over the previous three years, and which had probably started to weigh him down. Yet he was equally aware that this was not a good way to proceed, telling MacGreevy that Prentice ‘no doubt was right’ in turning the story down. Indeed, there is much evidence that by the end of 1933 Beckett had become all too aware of the fact that he had to find a new kind of writing, away from Joyce’s influence. Indeed, ‘Echo’s Bones’ contains several aesthetic passages which elicit Beckett’s growing awareness of the need to find his own style. Like Dream, the story thus predicts Beckett’s change of language, his move to French, as Lord Gall twice vehemently urges Belacqua to ‘cut out the style’. Furthermore, the text is also self- conscious about its intertextual density. As Belacqua exclaims, in conversation with Lord Gall: ‘My ideas! Really, my Lord, you forget that I am a postwar degenerate. We have our faults, but ideas is not one of them’ (qtd. with permission in Nixon 2006b).

1 Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). 2 But see, for example, Julie Campbell’s essay ‘Echo’s Bones and Beckett’s Disembodied Voices’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11, (2001), 454-60 as well as José Francisco Fernández’s ‘“Echo’s Bones: Samuel Beckett’s Lost Story of Afterlife’, Journal of the Short Story in English 52 (Spring 2009), 115-24. Short but valuable discussions of the text can be found in Ruby Cohn’s A Beckett Canon, and John Pilling’s Beckett before Godot. 3 Beckett’s notes on the ‘Cow’ cover two pages (7r and 7v) of a set of loose sheets held at Trinity College Dublin Library as TCD MS MS10971/2.

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Works Cited

Ackerley, Chris. ‘Demented Particulars: the Annotated Murphy.’ Journal of Beckett Studies 7.1-2 (1997-98)

Beckett, Samuel. ‘Echo’s Bones’ [typescript]. Baker Library, Dartmouth College. Photocopy consulted at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Leventhal Collection.

---. Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook. Ed. John Pilling. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999.

---. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Campbell, Julie. ‘“Echo’s Bones” and Beckett’s Disembodied Voices.’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 11 (2001): 454-60.

Francisco Fernández, José. ‘“Echo’s Bones: Samuel Beckett’s Lost Story of Afterlife.’ Journal of the Short Story in English 52 (2009): 115-24

Nixon, Mark. ‘“Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett reading German Literature.’ Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16 (2006): 259-282. [2006a]

---. ‘“Guess where”: from reading to writing in Beckett.’ Genetic Joyce Studies 6 (2006). [2006b]

---. ‘Between Gospel and Prohibition: Beckett in Nazi Germany 1936-1937.’ Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Ed. Sean Kennedy and Katherine Weiss. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. 31-46.

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