Dream of Fair to Middling Women (2 page)

Dream of Fair to middling Women,
Samuel Beckett's first novel which has remained unpublished for sixty years, was written at the Trianon Hotel, on the Rue de Vaugirard in Paris, during the summer of 1932 when the author was twenty-six years old.

At the time Samuel Beckett's published writings consisted of a prize-winning poem
Whoroscope
published in 1930, two essays of criticism: “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” published in 1929 in the collective work
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress,
and his
Proust,
published in 1931. Some eight poems and several of his short prose texts had also been published in reviews among which were, a piece of satire “Che Sciagura” (1929), four short prose pieces, “Assumption”, “The Possessed”, “Text” and “Sedendo et Quies-cendo”; the latter two were to be included in
Dream
along with some of the poems in prose form. In essence, therefore, this work of fiction reaches back to the author's deeper
roots in earlier days and forward to future writings in that it foretells much of what was to follow in poetry, prose and drama. Indeed many aspects of Samuel Beckett's philosophy are enunciated in
Dream: “Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath chair to the greatest of these?”
Some semi-autobiographical elements are prevalent in the portrait of Belacqua, the main character of the book, yet they are not to be overrated. The timeless span, later to become so characteristic of Beckett's work, gives to
Dream
a universal value for the reader to assess, fathom and enjoy.

Dream
was submitted by Samuel Beckett to a number of publishers without success. He knew that Ireland offered no hope given the anti-intellectualism of Irish Catholicism at the time and the lack of any rational objectivity in the unrelenting attitude of the Irish Censorship Board, which certainly would not have brooked such a novel as
Dream of Fair to middling Women.
He later castigated the Board in a witty essay, “Censorship in the Saorstat” (1935), by which time he himself was a victim with the banning of
More Pricks than Kicks.
London publishers were to prove no more audacious when he went there in 1933, hoping to find one sympathetic to
Dream.

Rather than pursue the fruitless fight for publication, Samuel Beckett decided to assemble some of the stories from
Dream
with others, including “Dante and the Lobster” which had been published in the Paris review
This Quarter
in December 1932. This collection of stories was published in London in 1934 as
More Pricks than Kicks.
That he had not at this time resigned himself to the rejection of
Dream
and that he intended, moreover, to have
Dream
published, albeit at some future unspecified date, is announced in
More Pricks than Kicks:

The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply immense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limæ labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years, ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it anyway.

In much later years, Samuel Beckett would express his strong doubts and misgivings about the creation of more youthful days, as indeed about much of his published work (“my other writings are no sooner dry than they revolt me”), including
More Pricks than Kicks
which he forbade to have reprinted for many years. Alert to these misgivings, while aware also that his deep feelings about
Dream
were not so clear-cut and hostile as he may have let appear, the decision to publish
Dream
has not been taken lightly. Indeed, if today
Dream
reaches the public as it was “bound to”, it is at Samuel Beckett's own behest, expressed to me in talks on the subject between 1975 and 1989.

When I began writing
The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland
in 1975, I realised how deficient a book purporting to illustrate the origins of much of Samuel Beckett's writing would be if
Dream,
a novel which ranks as one of his most Irish writings, was not referred to. He agreed to my quoting whatever I wished to take from
Dream
for
The Beckett Country.
My reading of the transcribed copy of the manuscript of
Dream
at the Beckett Archive in Reading University was, of necessity, perfunctory at the time, but it led to many discussions with Samuel Beckett about the work. In particular, I recall, he was interested in the reaction of a man more than thirty years his junior to
Dream
or, as he called it,
”the chest into which I threw my wild thoughts'.
His interest was all the more acute, I think, because he had forgotten much of the detail of
Dream
and it
allowed us to wallow gently in the nostalgia of his Dublin. We discussed, during those meetings in Paris, his having “pilfered” the “chest” and whether or not anything worthwhile remained. Such discussions were a means of fond recollection, yet he could not tolerate memories of times past if the pain became too acute. When, for example, I showed him the photograph I had found of Bill Shannon, the postman of
Dream
—and later of
Watt
—who whistled “The roses are blooming in Picardy”, his face, first alight with joy, disassembled into anguish and he knew I appreciated the need for us to part so that he could be alone.

In 1986, Samuel Beckett asked me to visit him in Paris to discuss
Dream.
He was considering, he told me, how best to help a friend to whom he wished to give a text for publication, and he asked me if it should be
Dream.
We did not reach, nor attempt to reach, a decision that evening, but merely bandied about the pros and cons. When I returned to see him shortly afterwards, he had made up his mind. He could not face the pain of going back to the “chest” where, whether they had been happy or fraught with sorrow, the wild thoughts of his youth-days were so vividly stored.

Shortly afterwards, he told me
Dream
should be published, but he did not want this to happen until he was gone “for some little time”. He asked me to hold the “key” to the “chest” until I thought fit.

The original typed manuscript of
Dream
had remained in Samuel Beckett's possession until 1961 when he gave it, with other texts, to Lawrence E. Harvey to assist him in writing his critical monograph
Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic
which remains the finest biographical study published
on Beckett. Harvey gave the manuscript to Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in 1971, stating in so doing that he regarded
Dream
as “valuable for the insights it provides into the temperament, intellect, talent, and interests of the young Beckett and constitutes the necessary point of departure in assessing his development as a writer”.

Dream
is indeed such and very much more besides. It is a major literary achievement and this consideration, together with Samuel Beckett's wishes in regard to publication, led his literary executor and long-time friend, Jérôme Lindon, to grant permission for me to edit
Dream
for publication.

Up to now
Dream
has been available only to scholars and researchers who could peruse the original manuscript in the Dartmouth archives, or, later on, a typed transcription of it in the Beckett Archive at Reading University. This has led inevitably to an unsatisfactory state of affairs whereby much of
Dream
has been quoted and published, with more or less appropriate comments, in substantial extracts which deny the reader an objective, unbiased and personal appreciation of the whole novel. Moreover, such extracts can but dangerously misrepresent the entire work.

Samuel Beckett himself, as I have pointed out, “pilfered the chest” which served as a point of commencement for many later works—
Happy Days
and
Krapp's Last Tape
spring to mind. It was also a depository for some earlier writings—the poems “Enueg I”, “Dortmunder”, “Alba” and “Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin” being examples. Substantial parts of
Dream
appear almost verbatim in
More Pricks than Kicks,
notable examples being “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux”, “Ding-Dong” and “A Wet Night”. Here again such extracts can
but give a restricted and pale idea of the whole novel.
More Pricks than Kicks
is a collection of vignettes of Dublin life;
Dream of Fair to middling Women
has the wealth of the complete form and full structure of a novel about a young man, his loves and travels in Europe.

Thus
Dream
provides us with some precious, almost
archaeological,
insights into the developing aesthetics of a remarkable mind, demonstrating the path that the later works were to follow. For example, we see the artist in turmoil with himself and with art:

The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface.

As Samuel Beckett struggles with the essence of the artistic experience, solutions become apparent:

… we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best.

The future form of writing, if not yet apparent in the exuberance of
Dream,
may be seen, nonetheless, clearly taking shape:

I was speaking of something of which you have and can have no knowledge, the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven. Their names occur to me. The terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of insane areas of silence.

Indeed, the expression of his unique vision was only to be fully realised later, when he returned spiritually to the “chest” to find once again the way forward:

The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory.

Dream
should not, however, be considered only with a backward glance from the vantage point Samuel Beckett's completed
œuvre
provides us with today. Whatever its progeny may have been in the author's later writings, it stands on its own, imposing itself on us with its exuberant wealth, a full-blown “rhapsody of energy”, indeed, as Be-lacqua says. Harvey, most appropriately, alludes to the “verbal exuberance”, the “undisciplined fantasy” and the “intellectual virtuosity” to be found in
Dream.
The young Beckett delights in words, he is exhilarated by the use of several languages, inebriated by the sheer joy of inventing new words and coining new phrases which abound “scurrying and plunging towards exitus “. Much of the very lively wealth of
Dream
lies in that turmoil of language, in that inventiveness which is far from being merely clever intellectual gymnastics, but much more essentially the expression and deep imprint of Samuel Beckett's vital sense of humour.
Dream
is a book of humour—of “laffing and laffing”—which, like so much of his later work, already belies the serious misconception that his work is only of the dark and gloomy side.

A few words need here be said about the editing of
Dream.
The first is to express the debt I owe my co-editor, Edith Fournier, a life-long friend of Samuel Beckett who
has translated some of his works from English to French. Without her help I would have been unable to complete the task of editing which became a much more complex assignment than I had originally envisaged. Precisely on account of the verbal exuberance and inventiveness of
Dream,
we had not only to be obsessional in proofreading—not as straightforward a task as might usually be the case—but, more importantly, we had to discuss nuances that might have been typographical errors made by Samuel Beckett or intentional word-playing and word-coining, precious “margaritas”, not to be lost in the proceedings. In
Dream,
Samuel Beckett crossed the barriers of language from English—and English as used by the Irish—to French, from German to Italian and Spanish, and he resorted quite often to Latin. He also experimented with words and deliberately flaunted grammatical convention at times outrageously so that in truth there were occasions when only he could have said what was intended. In such instances we had to rely as much on our knowledge and understanding of Samuel Beckett, the man, as of his writing. If we have failed him, the responsibility is ours.

We were faced with a decision to delete short pieces of text only twice, when of two almost identical passages, one was obviously the weaker preliminary draft of a later improved version. This replication served no purpose and Samuel Beckett, we believe, would have done as we did had he been reading the proofs. First, the passage on pp. 68-70 (“Ne suis-je point pale?” down to “helmet of salvation”) was retained in preference to a shortened, but essentially similar passage which had followed the paragraph ending with: “… she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede” on p. 15. Secondly, the Dartmouth manuscript contains two versions of the novel's ending, the final
part of the subsequent version being hand-written by Samuel Beckett. We have chosen the latter, which does not differ in meaning but is so much better in expression than the earlier version.

We have also been careful not to distort through correction Samuel Beckett's idiosyncrasies of punctuation and spacing. In his typescript, he emphasised intervals of time, interludes, and changes of mood by varying the conventional line-spacing and indents. The subtlety of this contrivance might easily be overlooked but we believe it important that it be retained, unusual though it may seem at times.
Dream,
after all, is an unusual book.