Synopses & Reviews
In 1933, Chatto and Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's
More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated storieshis first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, "Echo's Bones", to serve as the final piece. However, hed already killed off several of the charactersincluding the protagonist, Belacquathroughout the book, and had to resurrect them from the dead. The story was politely rejected by his editor, as it was considered too imaginatively playful, too allusive, and too undisciplinedqualities now recognized as quintessentially Beckett. As a result, "Echo's Bones" (not to be confused with the poem and collection of poems of the same title) remained unpublisheduntil now, nearly eight decades later.
This little-known text is introduced by the preeminent Beckett scholar, Dr. Mark Nixon, who situates the work in terms of its biographical context and textual references, examining how it is a vital link in the evolution of Beckett's early work. Beckett confessed that he included "all I knew" in the story. It harnesses an immense range of subjects: science, philosophy, religion, literature; combining fairy tales, gothic dreams, and classical myth. This posthumous publication marks the unexpected and highly exciting return of a literary legend.
Review
In Becketts fiction, every other word serves to snap the reader back to consciousness.” The New York Times Book Review
Review
Praise for Echo's Bones"We see Beckett the late-modernist offering homage to his overweening exemplar James Joyce and at the same time twisting and thrashing as he tries to fly the Joycean nets and become his own man. In the end, it is as a part of the record of this struggle that Echos Bones is of interest. . . . This volume is a masterpiece of scholarship." John Banville, New Statesman
"An elaborate, mock-heroic fantasy that combines existentialism with elements of Dantes Divine Comedy. . . . It is Echos Bones that shows us the things that Beckett would do so well in later decades." Arifa Akbar, The Independent
"Flights of Wildean repartee alternate with a Joycean ornateness of prose. . . . [Echos Bones] contains in embryo Becketts whole extraordinary world of comic dread and Dürer-like imagination." Financial Times
"[In Echos Bones] we see clear signs of the features that will blossom into Becketts distinct aesthetic: the existential angst and the dialogue in which neither party is making any genuine contact. Best of all, the absurdist humor, mixed with despair." The Independent
Praise for Samuel Beckett
"Beckett's voices, now mocking, now doubting, always carry their own special lyricism . . . And perhaps to understand Beckett's sullen craft and art fully, it is best to recall that age during which all human voices almost automatically speak poetrychildhood. . . . And like the child, too, in his awful ambivalence, [Beckett] is beyondand beforejudgement, so close does he tread on that nether world between creation and destruction." Time
"In Becketts fiction, every other word serves to snap the reader back to consciousness." The New York Times Book Review
"It is in the vaudeville aspect that his exuberance gleams, and it is his exuberanceeven the exuberance of his despairthat endears an author to us, far more even than his message." Arthur Miller
"Poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, translator, and critic, Samuel Beckett created one of the most brilliant and enduring bodies of work in twentieth-century literature. . . . It is an experience unequaled anywhere in the universe of words." Paul Auster
"He represents perfectly one supreme pole of the art of writing." William Gass
"[Beckett's work is a] continual search for a special type of perfection, a perfection manifest in his unfailing stylistic control and economy of language, his remorseless stripping away of superfluidities." A. Alvarez
Review
Praise for Echo's Bones"Its pungent early Beckett, written while he was still under the sway of his mentor, James Joyce, but with a soundscape all its own: rude, surreal, death-haunted, sex-addled, dry as bone. . . . The storys pleasures are real, however, and reside in Becketts full tilt, Devil-ready language. His paragraphs unfurl like parades, notations on lifes sick pageant. . . . Its a punks manifesto (Beckett was 27 when he wrote it) that gets at why Beckett continues to matter. . . . 'Echos Bones' returns Beckett the troublemaker." Dwight Garner, New York Times
"A fascinating glimpse at an essential author at the start of his career. . . . ['Echos Bones' is] exuberant, allusive, full of puns and wordplay." David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"We see Beckett the late-modernist offering homage to his overweening exemplar James Joyce and at the same time twisting and thrashing as he tries to fly the Joycean nets and become his own man. In the end, it is as a part of the record of this struggle that Echos Bones is of interest. . . . This volume is a masterpiece of scholarship." John Banville, New Statesman
"Glorious rhythms, ideas and wordplay . . . a rewarding and stimulating read for lovers of language and artistic inventiveness." Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"'Echos Bones', with its comic brio and ostentatious learning, is a significant link between a novice intellectual and the mature author of one of the 20th centurys most celebrated plays." The Economist
"A fascinating immersion . . . sincere and gravely serious." Arts Fuse
"An extended prose poem, an exercise in beautiful language and striking image . . . this short text finds its rightful place among Becketts novels, plays and poems." Kirkus Reviews
"Flights of Wildean repartee alternate with a Joycean ornateness of prose. . . . ['Echos Bones'] contains in embryo Becketts whole extraordinary world of comic dread and Dürer-like imagination." Financial Times
"An elaborate, mock-heroic fantasy that combines existentialism with elements of Dantes Divine Comedy. . . . It is Echos Bones that shows us the things that Beckett would do so well in later decades." Arifa Akbar, The Independent
"[In 'Echos Bones'] we see clear signs of the features that will blossom into Becketts distinct aesthetic: the existential angst and the dialogue in which neither party is making any genuine contact. Best of all, the absurdist humor, mixed with despair." The Independent
"A wonderful, mind-bending curiosity." Guardian
Synopsis
In September 1933, the publishers Chatto and Windus agreed to publish Becketts collection of short stories,
More Pricks than Kicks. Writing to Beckett, Chattos 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 books length. Beckett agreed, and proceeded to write the short story Echos Bones. By the tenth of November, the story was on Prentices 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. 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. Becketts response to this rejection does not survive, but appears to have been understanding. The writing of Echos 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.
As a result of this episode, the story Echos 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 Becketts development as a writer, will finally be published.
Echos 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. As such it belongs to what Stan Gontarski has termed Becketts 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, Echos Bones, as we shall see, constitutes a nexus of intratextual and intertextual references, a textual network which implicates several of Becketts 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.
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 Belacquas body, and the story ends with one of Becketts 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 Prentices 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 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 Becketts 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. . .
. . . If we set the short story Echos Bones into context with Becketts 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 Becketts 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 havent been doing anything. Charless fouting à la porte of Echos 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). Becketts 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 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 Joyces influence. Indeed, Echos Bones contains several aesthetic passages which elicit Becketts growing awareness of the need to find his own style. Like Dream, the story thus predicts Becketts change of language, his move to French, as Lord Gall twice vehemently urges Belacqua to cut out the style.”
Text drawn from: Nixon, Mark. "Belacque Revididus: Beckett's short sort 'Echo's Bones'" Limit(e) Beckett 1 (2010): 92-101. Web.
About the Author
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity College in Dublin. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation."
Mark Nixon is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also the Director of the Beckett International Foundation. He has published widely on Samuel Becketts work, and is an editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, a member of the editorial board of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, and Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is the current President of the Samuel Beckett Society.