I can’t go on, I’ll go on Page 2

  I sent a copy of the magazine to Mr. Beckett, whose address on the rue des Favorites I had managed to pilfer. Silence. But then one day Jérôme Lindon, to whom I had also sent the issue, let it slip that Beckett had in hiding a work, in English, written during the war and never published: Watt. By then I was an editor of Merlin, and wrote Beckett asking if we could see the work with a view toward publishing an extract in the magazine. More silence. But I had rather expected that.

  We had all but given up when one rainy afternoon, at the rue du Sabot banana-drying dépôt, a knock came at the door and a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat handed in a manuscript in a black imitation-leather binding, and left almost without a word. That night, half a dozen of us—Trocchi; Jane Lougee, Merlins publisher; English poet Christopher Logue and South African Patrick Bowles; a Canadian writer, Charles Hatcher; and I—sat up half the night and read Watt aloud, taking turns till our voices gave out. If it took many more hours than it should have, it was because we kept pausing to wait for the laughter to subside.

  We never had a real editorial discussion about which section we would use in the issue: Beckett had seen to that. He had specified which section we could use: Mr. Knott’s inventory of the possibilities of his attire (“As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and a boot, or a sock and a shoe, or a sock and a slipper, or nothing at all. . . .”) and the possible stations of the furniture in his room (“Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing-table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washhand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its head by the bed . . .,” etc.). I suspect Beckett was testing the artistic fiber of Merlin in so specifying, for, taken out of context, that passage might well have been considered boring or pedantic, waggish or wearily experimental-for-experimental’s-sake, by any literary review less dedicated to berating and attacking the Philistines without mercy. When, years later, I confronted Beckett with this accusation, he responded with a broad, bad-boy grin.

  At any rate, we published the designated extract of Watt in our next issue. I will not say the reaction was world-wide, but we received several angry letters, and cancellation of five percent of our subscribers (i.e., five cancellations). Avant-garde, all right, the letters said, but let’s keep some sense of proportion, let’s draw the line somewhere! We knew we were on the right track. Thereafter, virtually every issue of Merlin contained something by Beckett. And when, in the autumn of 1953, having lost relatively little money on the magazine, we determined we would expand and see if we could lose more money more quickly by publishing books, the first book we chose to publish was, of course, Watt.

  In July, 1953, Beckett wrote to his old friend and former literary agent, George Reavey, who since the war had been living in New York, to bring him up to date on his literary activities. After detailing those works which by then were out in French, he went on:

  . . . Also, (tiens-toi bien) our old misery, Watt, with the Merlin juveniles here in Paris who are beginning a publishing business.

  Earlier that year an agreement—I do not recall whether there was ever an actual formal contract—was reached with Mr. Beckett,* an advance of 50,000 francs ($100) duly paid, and we were ready to go into production. As is always the case with Beckett manuscripts, Watt was in impeccable condition. Although we proofread it, we found virtually nothing even to query, much less change. Two months later, Beckett would write again to Reavey noting that “Watt is just out in an awful magenta cover from the Merlin Press.” A full-page ad for the book appeared on the back cover of the spring-summer, 1953, issue of Merlin, although I suspect the book had not then appeared. The fall issue ran a further ad, detailing the printing:

  Watt (a novel) by SAMUEL BECKETT Ordinary Edition (1100 numbered copies) 850 fr. Special Edition (25 signed copies of a de luxe paper) 2,500 fr.

  As to the awful color of the cover paper, I can only assume there was a special on magenta. The book was typeset and printed at the Imprimerie Richard in Paris, and despite all the author’s care in typescript, the “Printer Richard,” who was touted to us as especially good because of his knowledge of English, managed to infiltrate so many typos that no matter how carefully we tried, we could never eliminate them all. If Beckett despaired of the garish color of the cover, I can only guess at the depths of his depression as he perused page after page of his printed work, replete with misspellings such as “scatch” for “scratch” (p. 50),* “nenomena” for “phenomena” (p. 79), and several dozen more. Not to mention a dropped word here and there, and a line set half a paragraph beyond where it appeared in manuscript. †­ His only consolation, perhaps, was the memory that Joyce, too, had suffered the same indignity at the hands of French printers with Ulysses, and survived.

  Up to this point, despite a brief glimpse in the misty Paris dusk, none of us had ever met Beckett. We had tried to trap him into a meeting through the ploy of needing his presence to sign the tip sheets of the twenty-five-copy limited edition of Watt during the summer, but he had eluded that one by having the sheets sent over to him via Les Editions de Minuit. If, from all this, anyone is under the impression that Beckett was being coy, let me reassure that insofar as that term can imply false shyness, nothing could be further from the truth. Beckett was a very private person, shy to a fault, and at least in those days uncomfortable with strangers. And since despite our efforts in his behalf we were still “strangers,” Beckett preferred to deal with us from afar.

  Our pro-Beckett stance soon contributed to Merlins growing list of practical problems. For more than a year, we had been waging a battle with the French postal authorities—pleading, wheedling, cajoling—to obtain magazine-rate postal privileges. The cost of mailing the magazine was slowly strangling us, and further prevented us from even attempting to enlarge our meager subscription list. We had submitted each of the issues of the magazine to the postal authorities as it had appeared, and slowly, agonizingly, inched our way up the bureaucratic ladder, each Gauloises-smoking rung passing the buck and sending us on to some vague superior. Our application was rejected variously on the grounds that the magazine appeared much too infrequently (true), that we could not demonstrate that we were a legitimate business, which required that we have a French gérant, or manager (which we did not), that we had failed to fill out certain basic forms (we had indeed failed to), etc. Since we considered the postal matter essential to survival, we one by one corrected these deficiencies until finally, one brisk day in late March, 1953, we were referred to a highly placed functionary, grizzled but not unkindly, whose office in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe looked as though it had not been cleaned since Napoleon left town. He leafed through the folder on his desk, which like W. C. Fields he had, with almost no warm up, magically located in the top third of a meter-high pile of similar files, and listened impassively as Trocchi and I repeated our impassioned plea in the name of Art, of France as the beacon of Freedom, not to mention Fraternity and Equality. He heard us out, then said: “Messieurs, I am not without sympathy with your arguments. But I regret to inform you that the department has turned down your request. You see, mailing privileges do not apply to organs of propaganda.”

  Trocchi and I looked at each other, stunned. We pressed for clarification, muttering that while we were propagandists for the Furtherance of Literature, that is all we could legitimately be accused of. The man held up one of the issues of Merlin containing a full-page ad for Watt. Then another announcing the forthcoming publication, in English, of Molloy. “Messieurs, who is Samuel Beckett?” he asked evenly. A writer, we chorused. A very fine writer. We have published several of his works in our magazine. “Indeed,” he went on. “Several. More, I might add, than of any other writer, far more. . . . This Mr. Beckett . . . does he not finance your magazine?” Most assuredly not. “Hmmmm.” Silence. “Because it is the studied
opinion of our examiners that your magazine exists primarily as an organ of propaganda dedicated to furthering the name and fortunes of Mr. Beckett. I’m afraid the case is closed.”

  While we were shocked at the time by the allegation, and depressed at the bureaucrats’ short-sighted assessment, looking back I realize they were not all that far from the mark: without doubt Merlin’s major contribution to posterity lay in its attempt to further the fame and fortune of Samuel Beckett. Fortune? Well, fame anyway.

  Biography-cum-Bibliography

  Who was this man, this ghost-in-the-night we had still never met?

  At that time Beckett, who had been living in France for a decade and a half, was in his mid-forties. Born at Foxrock, near Dublin, on April 13—a Friday to be sure—1906, Samuel was the second son of William and Mary Beckett. A quantity surveyor, whose job was to act as a middleman between architect and contractor in estimating the costs for a projected building, William was successful in his profession, a loving father who enjoyed nothing more than a weekend of hiking with his two young sons, a sports-oriented man who especially enjoyed golf.* Mary Roe Beckett, who before her marriage had been a nurse in a Dublin hospital, was a strong-willed woman. To critic Lawrence Harvey Beckett described her as “a pillar of strength and security.” And, of his childhood: “You might say I had a happy childhood. . . . My parents did everything they could to make a child happy.” But he was quick to add: “. . . although I had little talent for happiness.”

  It is clear that those looking for a facile link between the lonely despair in Beckett’s work and his formative years will have to look elsewhere.

  As so often happens with siblings, Samuel and his brother Frank were studies in contrast. Frank was an excellent athlete but only a good student. Samuel, a notch or two below in athletics, was a superb student. When they went to Portora Royal School, a preparatory school in Northern Ireland, Samuel was a member of the cricket team, of which his elder brother was captain. But young Beckett was also a member of the Portora swimming team, and excelled as well not only in rugby but in boxing. When, later, he went on to Trinity College, Dublin, his interest in sports continued unabated, and although he deprecated his performance, he was a bona-fide member of the Trinity cricket team.* Beckett also credited Portora with inculcating in him a profound interest in French and France, an interest he was to pursue at Trinity, under the tutelage of Dr. A. A. Luce, one of the period’s leading authorities on Berkeley, and Professor Thomas Rudmose-Brown, an eclectic and influential teacher whose assistant lecturer Beckett later became. Alec Reid, in an interview with Beckett, also reported that during those Trinity years “going to the cinema” ranked high among his extracurricular pursuits. Not surprisingly, the comic geniuses of the silent era were among his favorites: Buster Keaton (who three and a half decades later would star in Beckett’s only cinematic venture, which Grove Press produced in 1964, Film); Chaplin; Laurel and Hardy; and The Marx Brothers. Some of the business in Waiting for Godot, and notably the hat maneuvers, owes more than a nodding debt to the shenanigans of the above buffoons.

  By tradition, l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris has on its staff each year two lecteurs d’anglais, one appointed from Oxford, the other from Trinity College, Dublin. By tradition, too, the appointees are chosen from among the most brilliant recent graduates. In 1928, Trinity scholar Samuel Beckett was awarded the much-coveted post, and at the ripe old age of twenty-two set off for Paris. He held the post for two years. (“Post” is perhaps too formal a term, for the job entailed no teaching as such but, rather, making oneself generally available to students of English who had problems or questions they wanted to discuss with the lecteur. Thus Beckett had plenty of time to explore the nonacademic aspects of Paris.)

  His predecessor at l’Ecole Normale was a man named Thomas MacGreevy, a pleasant, gregarious young man who was already a friend of James Joyce. Through MacGreevy, Beckett met not only Joyce but George Reavey, a poet who would later publish Beckett’s book of poems, Echo’s Bones, as well as act as his literary agent in a vain effort to get other works published. Through these initial contacts Beckett soon met other literary figures of the time, among them Eugene Jolas, the publisher of transition; Paul Valéry; Adrienne Monnier; Léon-Paul Fargue, and Nancy Cunard.

  Much has been written about the relationship between Joyce and Beckett, and about the influence of the former on the latter. I remember clearly, shortly after discovering Beckett, hearing a French friend to whom I was extolling the virtues of Molloy respond: “Ah, oui, oui. Beckett, c’est l’ancien secrétaire de Joyce.” (“Oh, yes, Beckett. He’s the one who used to be Joyce’s secretary.”) It’s a tag I have since heard dozens of times, though Ellmann and others have tended to clarify the misunderstanding. Beckett was never Joyce’s secretary, or otherwise in his employ. That he, as a young Irishman in Paris, with literary aspirations, was drawn to his elder compatriot and the growing circle of admiring figures around him is only natural. That he performed numerous services for Joyce, including reading aloud to the near-blind poet and carrying out “free, gratis, and for nothing” a number of other helpful, and often scholarly, tasks, there can be no doubt. In an interview with New York Times writer Israel Shenker in the mid-fifties, Beckett himself gave this assessment, which also dispelled the story that he had actually handled some of the Master’s correspondence:

  I was never Joyce’s secretary, but like all his friends I helped him. He was greatly handicapped because of his eyes. I did odd jobs for him, marking passages for him or reading to him, but I never wrote any of his letters.

  As for the “influence” itself, Beckett has given what is no doubt the best and fairest assessment of what he owes to Joyce, and how their goals are diametrically different:

  Joyce was a superb manipulator of material—perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that is superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not the master of my own material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. . . . My little exploration is the whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable— as something by definition incompatible with art.*

  To me, Beckett said simply: “Joyce taught me what it meant to be a real artist.” By which he meant the dedication, the single-mindedness necessary to realize, against all odds, ones artistic potential. It is noteworthy too, and quite typical, that Beckett described his extraordinary undertaking as “my little exploration.” Even late in his life, when his fame was world-wide, he had trouble taking himself, or his work, seriously—or, more properly, judging it fairly. Anyone who spent more than a little time with Beckett knows this to be true. It was a self-doubt, and a self-questioning, so deeply anchored in his soul that all the worlds fame or recognition never uprooted it.

  In the mid-fifties, when I was working with Beckett over a translation—from French to English—of his short story “La Fin,” I noted his inreasing despair not only at our seeming inability to transpose the story from one language to another but at what seemed to Beckett to be the painful inadequacy of the original. Beckett had once told me how hard it was for him to translate his own work, and how much time it took him. In my youthful exuberance—and ignorance—I suggested that, if it would give him more time to devote to creative work, I would attempt to translate something, essentially to save him time. Molloy seemed the most likely candidate, for hard on our publication of Watt we next wanted to bring out Molloy. I began work on a draft but had not progressed far when the financial pressures on Merlin became such that I landed a job that paid me enough not only to live on but to finance a couple of issues of the magazine. The hitch was that it took me out of Paris for six months, so I passed the task on to Patrick Bowles. Later, however, when I was back in Paris, Beckett suggested I try my hand at “The End.” For weeks I labored over the text, which when I had read it in the French ha
d struck me as beautifully simple. But the more I worked the more I realized how deceptive that initial impression had been. When I had finally completed the translation I informed Beckett, who suggested that we meet to go over it. We met at Le Dôme at Montparnasse, ensconced ourselves at an isolated table near the back, and began to work. Or rather: Beckett began to read. After a few minutes of perusing first my translation, then the original, his wire-framed glasses pushed up into the thick shock of hair above—the better to see, no doubt—he shook his head. My heart sank. Clearly, the translation was inadequate. “You can’t translate that,” he said, fingering the original with utter disdain. “It makes no sense.” Again he squinted at the two texts. Several more minutes of ruminations and cross-checking produced a more optimistic report. “That’s good,” he murmured. “Those first three sentences read very nicely indeed.” The opening passage to which he referred went, in my translation:

  They dressed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was to be used for, it was for my travelling expenses. When it was gone, they said, I would have to get some more, if I wanted to go on travelling.

  “What do you think of the word ‘clothed’,” Beckett said, “instead of’dressed’? ‘They clothed me and gave me money.’ Do you like the ring of it better?”

  Yes, clearly: “clothed” was the better word.