ECHO’S BONES
WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Collected Poems in English and French
The Collected Shorter Plays
(All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . , A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)
The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989
(Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1–8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment
Echo’s Bones
Endgame and Act Without Words
Ends and Odds
First Love and Other Shorts
Happy Days
How It Is
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
Krapps Last Tape: (All that Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)
Mercier and Camier
Molloy
More Pricks than Kicks
(Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)
Murphy
Nohow On
(Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho)
The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett
Rockaby and Other Short Plays
(Rockaby, Ohio impromptu, All Strange Away, and A Piece of Monologue)
The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett
(boxed paperback set)
Volume I: Novels
(Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)
Volume II: Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is)Volume III: Dramatic Works
Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism
Stories and Texts for Nothing
(The Expelled, the Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13)
Three Novels
(Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition
Watt
Samuel Beckett
ECHO’S BONES
Edited by Mark Nixon
Grove Press
New York
‘Echo’s Bones’ © the Estate of Samuel Beckett 2014
Commentary © 2014 by Mark Nixon
Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods
Jacket photograph ©BobAdelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Faber & Faber Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2045-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9407-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
CONTENTS
Letters from Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus to Samuel Beckett
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt of gratitude is to Edward Beckett, who has supported this publication since its inception several years ago. I would also like to thank the Beckett International Foundation, as well as Special Collections at the University of Reading, the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin and Random House for giving relevant permissions. I have benefited from the help and expertise of a number of scholars in annotating ‘Echo’s Bones’. Unfortunately, I am unable to pay proper and specific credit to any individual scholar to whom I am indebted for information, as this would have made the entries unwieldy, but wish to acknowledge my debt here. My greatest debt (not for the first, and undoubtedly not for the last time) is to John Pilling, who has grappled with this story for more years than I have, and has generously given me advice, hints and material along the way. He has helped me to clarify various difficult issues, and his annotated edition of Beckett’s Dream Notebook – the main source for material found in ‘Echo’s Bones’ – has made my task of annotating the text considerably easier. Further sources have been suggested or identified by Chris Ackerley, Aura Beckhöfer-Fialho, Tatyana Hramova, Dirk Van Hulle, Seán Kennedy, Marty Korwin-Pawlowski, the late Seán Lawlor, Paola Nasti, Matthew Scott and David Tucker, and I am grateful to all of them for their help in unravelling several riddles in the text. Thanks are also due to Jim Knowlson for his friendship and support. I am