Still no Godot, but a new nightmare from Beckett
An unpublished story by Samuel Beckett will finally hit the shelves this month, 80 years after it was rejected by his publisher as a nightmare read, the Guardian reports.
“Echo’s Bones” was originally destined to be the finale for “More Pricks Than Kicks”, Beckett’s 1934 collection of short stories. But his publisher, Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus, turned down the tale, fearing it would unnerve readers. “It is a nightmare … It gives me the jim-jams … Echo’s Bones would, I am sure, lose the book a great many readers. People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analysing the shudder,” Prentice wrote in a letter to Beckett.
The publication of the 13,500-word story later this month will be a major event for fans of the Irish writer and author of “Waiting for Godot”, who died in 1989. Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature in 1969 and inspired a generation of writers with his bleak vision of life.
In December 1933, Beckett wrote to a friend that the rejection of a story “into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of, discouraged me profoundly”.
Literature professor Dr Mark Nixon, who edits the new and complete volume of “More Pricks Than Kicks”, believes that the failure of the story prompted Beckett to write a poem of the same name, and to use the title again for his first collection of poems, “Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates”, published in 1935.
Nixon sympathises with Prentice’s decision to reject the tale, calling it “a difficult, at times obscure, story”, adding: “But if the story is rather wild and undisciplined, it is also quite brilliantly so … Echo’s Bones is, without doubt, more densely allusive, more Joycean, than any of Beckett’s other early writings; both on a verbal and a structural level, it harnesses a range of materials, from science and philosophy to religion and literature … Blending fairy tales, gothic dreams and classical myth, Echo’s Bones is in parts a fantastical story replete with giants, tree-houses, mandrakes, ostriches and mushrooms, drawing on a tradition of folklore as popularised by WB Yeats and the Brothers Grimm.”
Asked why it has taken so long for the story to be published, Nixon told the Observer: “During his lifetime, Beckett was rather negative about most of his works dating from the 1930s, and was reluctant to allow texts published in that decade to be republished … We would not be publishing this text had it simply been abandoned during the writing process. Beckett clearly wanted it to be published, which is why he wrote it and submitted it to Chatto, at their behest.”
