Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976 Part 1

SAMUEL BECKETT.

Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 19501976.

Edited by Mark Nixon.

Preface.

By 1957, Beckett had revolutionised the world of theatre with Waiting for G.o.dot and Endgame and had also redrawn the boundaries of prose fiction. But the three post-war novels which came to be known as the Trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable brought him to a textual dead end from which he found it difficult to continue. The final words of that last novel, The Unnamable, 'I can't go on, I'll go on', encapsulate the tensions underlying Beckett's own subsequent literary movements. As he stated in a letter to Mary Hutchinson, 'there seems to be no "going on", for me, from the Innommable [The Unnamable]'.1 In many ways, the prose works that Beckett would write over the next forty years were characterised by his sense that they were 'faux departs' ('false starts'); texts which no sooner begun ended in abandonment, or were discarded after a long struggle to find the path to a satisfactory conclusion. Beckett in these years told a friend that there were two rewarding moments in his creative endeavours, the one where he started a text, and the other where it ended in the waste-paper basket.

The difficulty of writing, and Beckett's own sense of failure, rendered a large part of the corpus from these years ultimately incomplete. t.i.tles such as From an Abandoned Work suggest the quality of drafts, elevated to the status of 'finished' works by ever more insistent publishers and public interest.2 Moreover, the compositional processes of these short prose works are intricately connected and intriguingly self-referential; this is no longer a writer who starts and completes a work, but one who across a wide range of texts realises that there is no possibility of completion. As the surviving ma.n.u.scripts from this period show, Beckett would start one text, lay it aside to start another, and then return to the original, or amalgamate the two, or abandon both. 'No matter, fail again, fail better', to quote Worstward Ho, appears to have been the guiding principle. We are thus perhaps not to view these prose pieces as separate, individual ent.i.ties, but as an on-going corpus of writing circling around what From an Abandoned Work calls 'all the variants of the one'. Themes, words, sentences and images resurface again and again across this writing, as well as in the works written for television or theatre.

With the exception of Comment c'est (1961), Beckett's creative landscape in the years after 1950 is littered with ever shorter, ever more pared-down texts, moving towards what the first Fizzle ('He is barehead') calls the 'minima'. One could argue that the Joycean exuberance of the early work of the 1930s and 1940s (aspiring to the master's 'Work in Progress') made way for what Beckett would call his 'work in regress' (note the lower case), the search for a distillation of existential and verbal expression. Moreover, Beckett wrote mostly in French during these years, and then faced the challenge of translating (or rather transmitting) the recalcitrant results into English.

Beckett's failure to find the right way of expressing his failure to express was compounded by the inability of his English language publishers to print his texts with adequate care. As was the case with the journals and newspapers in which many of them first appeared, Beckett's trade publishers in England (John Calder) and America (Grove Press) often failed to meet the challenge of presenting these exacting works. Part of the problem lay precisely in the fact that there were two English language publishers; as Beckett told the English scholar John Fletcher: 'There are often variants between English & American editions because different proofs corrected at different times.'3 A survey of the different publications reveals that Beckett's short prose has frequently appeared in erroneous forms. This is especially regrettable in the case of these particular works, in which the precision of language from repet.i.tion to punctuation and typographical presentation is so crucially important.

The present edition takes an eclectic approach to these texts, in so far as all available material evidence Beckett's ma.n.u.scripts, typescripts, correspondence with publishers, as well as page and galley proofs has been taken into account. The most reliable texts thus far of Beckett's post-war prose are contained in S. E. Gontarski's edition of The Complete Short Prose, 19291989, published by Grove Press in 1995 (hereafter cited as 'Grove 1995'), which has been followed as a base text against which to check the above evidence, being more reliable than Calder's Collected Shorter Prose, 19451980 (hereafter cited as 'Calder 1984'), which is riddled with errors despite the fact that Beckett read proof.

In terms of the ordering of contents, the decision was made to present these prose pieces (as far as possible) by order of composition, while at the same time upholding the 'groupings' seen into print by Beckett.4 This allows the reader to follow Beckett's developing aesthetic and the dialogue established between texts. The only difficulty with this procedure concerns Fizzles (or Foirades in French), consisting of eight distinct short prose texts. As John Pilling has argued, Beckett most probably wrote the first five (in French) as early as 1954. He then proceeded to write 'Se Voir' ('Closed place') in 1968, began writing 'Pour finir encore/For to End Yet Again' in French in 1969 and wrote 'Still' in English in 1972. These texts, written across a span of nearly twenty years, were then brought together in French (as Pour finir encore et autres foirades by Les editions de Minuit) and in English (as For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles by Calder, and as Fizzles by Grove Press) in 1976, each edition arranging the texts in a different order. By upholding the integrity of this group, their individual interaction with other pieces written in the interim is slightly obscured. (Thus, for example, 'Se Voir/Closed place', written in 1968, essentially reworks Le Depeupleur/The Lost Ones, which Beckett began in 1966 but then abandoned, and only completed with an additional final paragraph in 1970.) Furthermore, we need to remember that all of the so-called Fizzles were published individually in a magazine, before being collected in volume form. The same can be said of many of the works in the present edition. First published as individual slim volumes or in periodicals, they were only later 'collected' in larger gatherings. As his correspondence with publishers makes clear, Beckett acceded to the request for (in John Calder's words) 'acceptably sized volume[s]' by handing over whatever was still unpublished, and allowing texts previously published in limited editions or magazines to be reprinted.5 This is the background to volumes such as No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 19451966 (Calder & Boyars, 1967) and Six Residua (Calder, 1978). At the same time, there is no doubt that Beckett viewed the texts gathered under the t.i.tle Fizzles as belonging together, and the present edition upholds this coherence. I have chosen to place Fizzles according to the composition date of the latest text, though the reader should be mindful that they were written across a period of nearly twenty years.

Texts for Nothing.

Beckett started writing the thirteen Texts for Nothing in French on Christmas Eve 1950, and finished them a year later in late December 1951.6 He had a clear sense of what he was trying to achieve as with the three novels of the Trilogy, the ma.n.u.scripts of the Textes pour rien show remarkably little revision.7 However, the English translation proved a rather more arduous affair, and dragged on, or rather off and on, for nearly fifteen years. He began translating immediately after finis.h.i.+ng the French versions, in December 1951, but abandoned the task a year later. He resumed working on them in 1958 and again in 1963, but only completed the translations of all thirteen texts in December 1966. They first appeared together in English in No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 19451966 (Calder and Boyars, 1967) the t.i.tle is taken from 'Text for Nothing XIII' and in the same year in Stories and Texts for Nothing (Grove Press). Beyond minor issues of spelling, the texts of these stories have remained relatively uncorrupted across subsequent publications, and the current edition makes only two changes.8 In 'Text for Nothing IX', Grove Press editions give 'resumed by old offence', following Beckett's typescript. The current edition gives 'resumed my old offence', following the French original and Calder. In 'Text for Nothing IV', 'in the pit of my inexistence' is restored (Calder 1984 gives 'in the pit of my existence' a reminder that Beckett himself, when reading proof, was capable of missing errors).

The Texts for Nothing are often neglected, but in important ways they enabled Beckett to move beyond the Trilogy to the works of the later years. If the Trilogy still contained a recognisable plot loosely based on the quest narrative, the Texts for Nothing foreground a disintegration that the monologue of a troubled consciousness is unable to remedy. As 'Text for Nothing IV' boldly declares, there is 'no need for a story'. Having written these thirteen texts, Beckett again struggled to find a way to proceed. The ma.n.u.script notebook containing the second half of the French Textes pour rien also contains the drafts of four further prose pieces, all of which were, however, subsequently abandoned. Often mistakenly seen as further 'Texts for Nothing', these pieces differ significantly in terms of nature and tone. They develop a more clearly discernible plot, and they are also longer. Dissatisfied with these drafts, Beckett sought to solve his creative problem by changing language (back to English), a strategy which had served him well after he had started writing in French in 1946. And with his next prose work, From an Abandoned Work, Beckett began to concentrate his ideas in ever-shorter forms.

From an Abandoned Work.

It is difficult to date the composition with any certainty. Beckett later remembered it as written in 1954/1955, but John Pilling convincingly dates its composition to spring/summer 1954. The first work to be written in English after Watt (completed 1945), From an Abandoned Work represents a watershed in Beckett's writing. As Pilling has shown, the text as published is far shorter than the original ma.n.u.script draft, and thus represents one of the first instances of Beckett's later habit of textual distillation and contraction.9 Shot through with an atmosphere of narrative incoherence and arbitrariness, the story deals with the memory of three days recounted by a now old man. It was first published (with considerable editorial revision, and with what Beckett called 'varsity punctuation') in the Dublin undergraduate organ, Trinity News, on 7 June 1956, and (also with errors) in Grove Press's Evergreen Review a year later. The BBC broadcast a cleaned-up version on 14 December 1957 as 'The Meditation', spoken by Patrick Magee, which was subsequently published independently by Faber and Faber in 1958. The text in the present edition differs in one instance from Calder 1984 and Grove 1995 both of which print: 'Now was this my first experience of this kind, that is the question that immediately a.s.sails me' by restoring 'a.s.sails one', in agreement with all the early printings, and as conforming both to the lexical pattern of the text and to Beckett's subsequent French translation; nor is there material evidence that he wanted the change to be made.10 After From an Abandoned Work, Beckett turned his attention to drama, and, with the exception of five of the Foirades/Fizzles, which were consigned to a drawer for nearly twenty years, the only prose work to surface in the next decade was How It Is. This longer piece of fiction remains one of Beckett's most remarkable literary and, considering the psychological effort its composition demanded, emotional achievements. Written as Comment c'est between December 1958 and summer 1960, and translated into English by the end of January 1962, the novel variously antic.i.p.ates the poetic starkness of Beckett's later short prose.

Faux Departs.

In August 1964, Beckett began a new, longish work in English provisionally ent.i.tled 'Fancy Dying'. Ultimately abandoned, it sp.a.w.ned several separate texts of differing degrees of completion. Dating from August or September 1964, and given the overall t.i.tle Faux Departs, four extracts (three in French and one in English) were published in the German literary journal Kursbuch (June 1965). These 'false starts' mark a change in Beckett's prose writing, initiating a series, epitomising what Beckett frequently referred to as 'residual' pieces or 'Residua', that concentrates on the workings of the imagination in order to construct geometrically defined 'closed s.p.a.ces', in which human figures are placed or rather arranged. The opening of the English extract is a version of material found in All Strange Away, while the three French extracts antic.i.p.ate Imagination morte imaginez. Taken together, these brief pa.s.sages represent stages of Beckett's experimentation with a new kind of writing, and their appearance in print showed his increased willingness to allow fragments to be published.

All Strange Away.

All Strange Away grew out of 'Fancy Dying' and represents the first in a series in which objects and figures are arranged and rearranged in confined s.p.a.ces with mathematical precision. It deliberates on the conditions inside this entombed place, paying detailed attention to temperature, lighting and dimensions, as well as to the relations.h.i.+p between silence and sounds, and between degrees of whiteness. The language is minimal, estranged, spa.r.s.e yet suggestive. An elliptical text, All Strange Away responds to the fourth Faux Depart, and was abandoned in early 1965. However, in order to raise money for the widow of the actor Jack McGowran, Beckett returned to it, submitting All Strange Away in 1973 to the Gotham Book Mart for a limited edition ill.u.s.trated by Edward Gorey (published in 1976).

In terms of printing errors, All Strange Away has fared worst of all Beckett's prose texts. All six subsequent reprints introduce new errors, beginning with the version appearing in the Journal of Beckett Studies (1978). Calder's volume publication of All Strange Away (1979) introduced further errors. Beckett corrected several of these when he read proof for Calder in 1984, yet inexplicably Calder reverted to the original and erroneous 1979 text in the later collection of shorter prose ent.i.tled As the Story Was Told (1990). In his notes to Grove 1995, S. E. Gontarski argues that the text printed in Rockaby and Other Short Pieces (Grove, 1981) represents the most stable version, since Beckett ostensibly read proof for this volume.11 However, Grove 1995 at times ignores changes introduced in that volume, reprinting (correctly), for example, 'from ground top of swell' rather than the 1981 'from ground top to swell'.12 Indeed, the proofs for Rockaby and Other Short Pieces are problematic, Beckett having communicated corrections to Grove's publisher, Barney Rosset, by phone.

Imagination Dead Imagine.

When Beckett abandoned All Strange Away early in 1965, he had already been working (this time in French) on a new text, Imagination morte imaginez. Indeed, Imagination Dead Imagine was generated from the textual ruins of All Strange Away, and Beckett referred to it as the 'residual precipitate' of the earlier text. The two works share many similar features, not least the opening words 'Imagination dead imagine' (which also opens the fourth Faux Depart). The French text was finished on 19 March 1965 and published later that year in Les Lettres nouvelles, while the English translation was first published in the Sunday Times of 7 November 1965. The first independent volume publications were by Calder in 1965 and then in Grove's Evergreen Review of February 1966.13 The current edition retains the text of Calder 1984 and Grove 1995, but deviates in one instance, restoring the comma in 'alone are stable, as is stressed', following Beckett's typescript and the Sunday Times text.

Beckett would make the closed s.p.a.ce of Imagination Dead Imagine the focus of his creative endeavours over the following years, in both prose and drama (and television, if one thinks of Ghost Trio). In these works, immobile figures are 'imagined' and positioned by a dying imagination. The detached narration, the mathematical, even scientific tone of observation, connect an abstract and impersonal realm with a residual humanity.

Enough.

In 1968, Beckett told Ruby Cohn that he wrote the prose text Enough 'aberrantly', between Imagination Dead Imagine and Bing.14 Announcing a stark break in its opening line, 'All that goes before forget', it does indeed differ from the two surrounding works, while clearly revisiting familiar territory. In terms of both its unexceptional language and its first-person narrative, Enough is more accessible than the other prose pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, and returns to the journey theme that had marked Beckett's work from the 1950s. Written in French as a.s.sez between September and December 1965 (and published the following year by Les editions de Minuit), the English translation first appeared in the April 1967 issue of Books and Bookmen.

The Lost Ones.

Beckett started a new work, eventually called Le Depeupleur, in October 1965, but after a struggle abandoned it in May 1966. Le Depeupleur would, in turn, generate a host of other texts. However, in a letter dated 21 March 1970, Beckett told Calder that he was now considering publis.h.i.+ng the unfinished work in its entirety. Le Depeupleur duly appeared from Les editions de Minuit in 1970, and Beckett added a concluding paragraph shortly before correcting proofs in May 1970. He translated it into English between September and November 1971, and The Lost Ones was published by Calder and then Grove Press in 1972 (the latter photoset from the former).15 The narrative describes a cylinder containing roughly 200 'little people', all seeking their lost ones, or seeking an exit. The scrutiny of the s.p.a.ce itself, as well as the rules and behaviour governing its inhabitants, is scientific in procedure and impersonal in tone, and further explores the closed s.p.a.ces of All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine.

Ping.

The compositional history of the French text Bing (translated as Ping) is complex. There are ten surviving versions (held in ma.n.u.script notebooks and typescripts at Was.h.i.+ngton University, St Louis), which reveal just how much Beckett struggled to make progress with this text. Indeed, in a note accompanying the ma.n.u.scripts, Beckett specified that 'Bing may be regarded as the result or miniaturization of Le Depeupleur abandoned because of its intractable complexities.' Having abandoned this longer text, Beckett salvaged parts in a new composition on 20 June 1966 with the t.i.tle 'Blanc', which he finished by September 1966 and which was published the following month as Bing in a limited edition by Les editions de Minuit. The English translation was begun immediately thereafter, and Ping was first published in the magazine Encounter (February 1967). It was not the only text to come out of the abandoned French piece Le Depeupleur, as Beckett subsequently allowed four extracts (or rather 'rejected texts') to be published in small magazines and art editions.16 Although Beckett stated that Bing was of the 'same future' as Imagination Dead Imagine, he was equally at pains to stress the fact that they are very different. Indeed, the text is closely linked to the failed project from which it arose, Le Depeupleur. His sense of relief at having been able to keep alive at least part of this larger text is evident in his admission, in a letter to Jocelyn Herbert, that Ping was 'hardly publishable which matters not at all'. Indeed, one can only suspect that the kind of writing produced by this 'miniaturization' was precisely what Beckett was striving for, 'brief and outrageous all whiteness and silence and finishedness'.17 Outrageous, yes, in that Beckett fas.h.i.+ons a new linguistic minimalism in this text, forgoing verbs, articles, p.r.o.nouns and prepositions, as well as punctuation other than the full stop, while giving rein to verbal echoes, eye rhymes and repet.i.tions made musical through a.s.sonance and alliteration.

Lessness.

Beckett was to use the mathematical dimensions of the 'closed s.p.a.ce texts' in the compositional process of Sans, finished in August 1969 and published that same year by Les editions de Minuit. A set of six thematic groups ('families') of ten sentences are arranged in different permutations and combinations.18 According to Beckett's foreword to the Calder edition (Signature Series 9, 1970), the work deals with the 'collapse of some such refuge as that last attempted in Ping and with the ensuing situation of the refugee'. Originally ent.i.tled 'Without', the English translation was first published as Lessness in the New Statesman on 1 May 1970. Sending the text to Calder at the end of March 1970, Beckett ironically referred to it as 'Endless', while drawing his publisher's attention to the importance of being able to see proofs. Beckett made changes to the typographical structure of the text, in proof, first introducing paragraph breaks, before settling for paragraph indentation rather than breaks.

Beckett would continue to write, as he told Kay Boyle, in the same 'scape' as Lessness, albeit with dust rather than sand as the organic matter of choice.19 The result was 'Pour finir encore', which became one of the Foirades/Fizzles.

Fizzles.

Originally written in French, five of these texts ('He is barehead', 'Horn came always', 'I gave up before birth', 'Old earth' and 'Afar a bird') were published individually in the journal Minuit between November 1972 and May 1973, before being collected by Les editions de Minuit as part of Pour finir encore et autre foirades in 1976. Their composition has often been dated to circa 1960, following Beckett's own note to this effect to Calder.20 However, there is evidence to suggest that they were written in 1954.21 It is a sign of Beckett's dissatisfaction that it took nearly twenty years for them to appear in print. Their publication in English was accelerated by the prospect of a limited edition ill.u.s.trated by the American artist Jasper Johns. Beckett translated them between November 1973 and March 1975, replacing 'Afar a bird' with the more recent 'Closed place' (written 1968). The Jasper Johns edition, published in 1976, undoubtedly galvanised Beckett's trade publishers into requesting their own respective editions of these shorts, so that in that same year Foirades was published by Les editions de Minuit, and Fizzles by both Calder and Grove Press. Together with 'Closed place', Beckett decided to add two further recent prose texts ('Still' and 'For to End Yet Again') to the original five. It is striking that all four editions present the texts in a different order, with Calder following Beckett's own instructions of putting the most recent (and longest) text first, whereas Les editions de Minuit roughly followed the order of composition. 'Closed place' originated in French as 'Se voir' in 1968, and revisits the confined s.p.a.ces of The Lost Ones and Bing. Often cited as 'Endroit clos' (the piece's opening words), Beckett translated it as 'Closed place' in February 1974.22 His difficulties with the composition are evident from the five separate openings of the piece contained in a ma.n.u.script notebook ent.i.tled 'Fragments Prose debut 68'.23 Beckett began work on what was to become 'Pour finir encore' in November 1969, and appears to have finished it by October 1973.24 Beckett allowed an extract comprising a version of the opening seven sentences, aptly ent.i.tled 'Abandonne', to be published in a limited edition with ill.u.s.trations by Genevieve a.s.se in 1972. He translated the story into English in December 1975, and the text first appeared in New Writing and Writers 13 (Calder, 1975) before becoming part of the French and English Foirades/Fizzles.25 The text plays on the familiar Beckettian distinctions of beginning and ending, but the incessant repet.i.tion and intractable difficulties produced by the lack of punctuation and unfamiliar syntactical arrangement of words render any summary incomplete.

Beckett wrote the final Fizzle, 'Still', in English in the months of June and July 1972 (before finis.h.i.+ng 'Pour finir encore'). It was first published in 1974 in a limited edition ill.u.s.trated by Bill Hayter. It appears, from a letter to Ruby Cohn of September 1972, that Beckett envisaged a series of texts in the same vein as 'Still'. Indeed, he proceeded to write two further related texts, which are given here in an appendix: 'Sounds' (first mentioned in September 1972, and finished in June 1973) and 'Still 3', which was written in June 1973. Both were first published in Essays in Criticism (April 1978), with an explanatory essay by John Pilling, who had convinced Beckett to allow them to be printed. One textual change has been made for the current edition: in 'Still 3', 'lips the ones' has been changed to 'lids the ones'.26 No further 'Still' texts were written.

It appears that Beckett had as early as 1972 or 1973 begun to think of the first five of these texts as 'Foirades', citing in a letter to John Kobler of March 1973 an entry from his Pet.i.t Robert dictionary: 'Foirade Le fait de foirer. Foirer rater, echouer lamentablement.' As with From an Abandoned Work, Beckett's sense of these texts as 'failures' is inscribed in their overall t.i.tle. Alternately, he at times referred to the fact that 'foirer' related to diarrhoea, and the English t.i.tle appears to have appealed to him for its connection with the action of breaking wind.27 It is impossible to tell whether Beckett initially thought of 'Still' and 'For to End Yet Again' as 'Foirades', although the fact that in correspondence with Ruby Cohn he spoke of a 'Still' series suggests that this was not the case. If 'Still' is the odd text out here owing to its being the only piece written in English, 'For to End Yet Again' differs thematically and in terms of length from the other texts. There is a sense that the unity of the Foirades/Fizzles editions stems as much from the fact that these eight texts had not yet been collected in print as from any unifying stylistic or thematic coherence, although they share an increasing linguistic experimentation.28

As the Story Was Told.

Beckett wrote As the Story Was Told (in English) quickly, between 4 and 13 August 1973. It was composed for a memorial volume of the German poet and writer Gunter Eich, whom Beckett had met several times and who had committed suicide at the age of sixty-six.29 The story revolves around notions of guilt and punishment as a speaker endeavours to comprehend his part in the interrogation and torture of a man who is being held in a tent nearby. Although the piece is written with ostensible simplicity, it withholds the precise nature of the crime of the first-person narrator, or of the person under scrutiny. It was published in Gunter Eich zum Gedachtnis (1973), then in Calder 1984.

La Falaise/The Cliff.

Beckett's next prose work was also dedicated to a fellow artist. Written in French between 6 January and 26 March 1975 with the working t.i.tles 'Pour Bram' or 'a Bram', in homage to Beckett's friend, the painter Bram Van Velde, it was first published as 'La Falaise' in Celui qui ne peut se servir de mots: a Bram Van Velde (Fata Morgana, 1975), and remained untranslated by Beckett. The present edition reprints Edith Fournier's translation first published in Grove 1995, and, because not translated by Beckett himself, the French original. Beckett told John Pilling in a postcard dated 7 October 1978 that he was not thinking of any specific painting by Van Velde when writing the text.30 As with so many of Beckett's later works, La Falaise/The Cliff defies generic definition. Although its typographical layout marks this piece as prose, its tightly knit structure suggests a prose poem. Generic uncertainty is more evident still in the final work included in this edition, the very brief text neither.

neither.

In his responses to the 'queries re prelims to Collected Shorter Prose 194580' (sent to Susan Herbert at Calder Publishers and dated 5 February 1984), Beckett stated that 'neither' was not written as a poem and that Calder could include the text in the prose volume should he wish, as long as he appended the note 'Written for the composer Morton Feldman'. Beckett had previously opposed its inclusion in Collected Poems in English and French (Calder, 1977). Written in September 1976, neither was first published in the programme notes accompanying its performance in Rome on 12 June 1977, set to music by Feldman. The publication history is one of error, mainly of a typographical nature, based on a confusion as to whether to present the text as prose or verse. neither was reprinted, with errors, in the Journal of Beckett Studies 4 (1979) and gathered in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (Calder, 1990). The work stresses inbetweenness, or rather a 'between-ness' moving 'to and fro' from inner to outer shadow, from self to unself, between poem and prose. The text is here presented without line breaks, according to Beckett's wish that it be regarded as prose.

A short preface cannot do justice to the beauty and innovation of Beckett's achievement in the short prose works collected in this volume. The reader will undoubtedly struggle at times with the mathematical, impersonal, uncertain s.p.a.ces and spare language constructed by Beckett in the years 1950 to 1976. In the 'closed s.p.a.ces' of Beckett's imaging of consciousness, we are forced to move through stark and harsh landscapes. At the same time, presenting human existence in isolation, these works inscribe the immense poetic force of endurance and of a prose without adornment. In these twenty years of compositional struggle, Beckett paved the way for the luminous works of his final decade of writing Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still and his last text, 'What is the word'. In removing all that is incidental, in textual and existential terms, Beckett can in these pages be seen slowly to write himself ever closer to what he called 'the next next to nothing'.31 Excerpts from Samuel Beckett's letters to Mary Hutchinson, John Fletcher, Kay Boyle, John Kobler, A. J. Leventhal, Ruby Cohn The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. Unpublished letters from Samuel Beckett to Mary Hutchinson, John Fletcher, Kay Boyle, John Kobler and A. J. Leventhal reproduced with kind permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Unpublished letters from Samuel Beckett to Ruby Cohn reproduced with kind permission of the Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading.

Notes.

1 Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 6 February 1959, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

2 In a letter of 3 November 1965, Calder tells Beckett that he is being 'pursued' by readers who believe his publis.h.i.+ng house has a 'conspiracy' to withhold Beckett's short prose from publication. BeckettCalder Correspondence, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2073/1.

3 Letter to John Fletcher, 20 May 1972, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

4 In establis.h.i.+ng the order of composition followed in this volume, I am indebted to Emeritus Professor John Pilling.

5 John Calder, letter to Samuel Beckett, 30 October 1964, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2073/1.

6 Several of the Textes pour rien were first published in journals before being collectively published as Nouvelles et Textes pour rien by Les editions de Minuit in November 1955. See the publication list at the end of this volume for details.

7 Note, however, that XIII 'Text for Nothing was written prior to XII', but their order reversed by Beckett when published.

8 To give one example: there is a discrepancy in the hyphenation, or lack thereof, of 'third cla.s.s' in 'Text for Nothing VII' across all editions, and Beckett himself appears to have been unsure about this. He thus in the typescript adds a hyphen to 'third-cla.s.s waiting-room' but not to 'third cla.s.s ticket', and then is not consistent in the proofs of subsequent editions. The present edition consistently omits the hyphen.

9 For an insightful discussion of the genesis of this text, see Pilling's essay 'From an Abandoned Work: "all the variants of the one"', in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 18, '"All Sturm and no Drang": Beckett and Romanticism Beckett at Reading 2006', ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 17383.

10 I am grateful to John Pilling for his help with this variant. Pilling draws attention to Beckett's change of 'me' to 'one' in the original holograph ma.n.u.script of the text in the so-called 'Tara McGowran Notebook' held at Ohio State University.