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Samuel Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’ will be published by Continuum (2011), and his critical edition of Beckett’s unpublished short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ is appearing with Faber & Faber in 2011.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Bones’, which of course is not to be confused with the poem and 1935 collection of poems of the same title, remained unpublished.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. 93 Limit{e} Beckett 1 | Autumn 2010 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 94 Nixon | Belacqua Revididus 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 95 Limit{e} Beckett 1 | Autumn 2010 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.