‘the blue bitch’s affront’: in ‘Walking Out’, Belacqua’s dog urinates over the vagabond’s trousers, who responds with a voice ‘devoid of rancour’ (MPTK 104). The Beckett family had Kerry Blue terriers.
‘dunderhead’: ‘ponderously stupid person’ (OED); employed by Sterne in Tristram Shandy (IX, xxv).
‘dolt on some Christ’s account’: a fool, again referring to Doyle’s tattoo.
‘I’ll lay you six to four’: cf. the bets placed on Hamlet’s swordsmanship.
‘pentacle’: in the typescript, Beckett had initially written ‘quincunx’.
‘bottle not of stout but of schnapps’: reference to the fact that in ‘Draff’ the groundsman Doyle drinks Guinness (MPTK 183).
‘flat themes’: in ‘Draff’, these are ‘the ancient punctured themes recurring, creeping up the treble out of sound’ (MPTK 183).
‘bougie’: French for ‘wax-candle’.
‘amethyst’: the word means ‘not drunken’ or ‘not intoxicated’, deriving from the belief that the stone could prevent intoxication; it thus does not give alcohol ‘a fair chance’.
‘temptation and commercial travelling’: from Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (III, 1), as noted in DN: ‘this frail life that is all temptation & knighthood’ (596). Cf. also Dream 3 and 45.
‘my numerous wives and admirers’: a reference to the various (‘fair to middling’) women with whom Belacqua has relationships in MPTK.
‘privy, papered’: taken from Burton (I, 23), and noted in DN as ‘putid songsters & their carmina quae legunt cacantes’ (727). The Latin is from an epigram by Martial, and translates as ‘poems which people read at stool’. Beckett quotes the line in a letter to MacGreevy of 8 November 1931 (LSB I 94).
‘peccadilloes’: minor sins or offences.
‘chaff’: an entry in DN (1174) quotes Chaucer: ‘Let be the chaf, & wryt wel of the corn’ (Skeat, A text, l. 529).
‘Irish Statesman’: the Irish Statesman was a journal edited by AE (George Russell); first published on 15 September 1923, it folded on 12 April 1930. AE turned down two pieces of writing Beckett had submitted to the journal, possibly the short story ‘Assumption’ in summer 1929 and a poem in spring 1930. AE’s interest in the psyche is evident from the title of one of his articles, ‘The Poet and his Psyche’.
‘Mr Quin’: the reference here is to ‘Hairy’ Capper Quin, Belacqua’s best man and, after his death in ‘Draff’, the man who replaces him in the affections of the Smeraldina. Although he is bald, his name ‘Hairy’ suggests potency, and he may be father of Smeraldina’s babies mentioned in this story. A character named ‘Quin’ appears in the early drafts of Watt, then again in Mercier and Camier (as ‘someone who does not exist’), Malone Dies and the unpublished French story ‘Ici personne’.
‘to adopt the happy expression of Mr Quin’: misremembering the Smeraldina’s words in ‘Draff’: ‘Home Hairy’ (MPTK 183).
‘last long home’: referring to death, or rather the kind of ultimate annihilation which has so far escaped Belacqua.
‘the sty’: Beckett had originally written ‘most of my week-ends’.
‘mot of some note’: only of note in that it is an elaborate revision of the following line (as iterated by Hairy Quin in ‘Draff’).
‘stinging . . . Death’: citing the Biblical ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ (I Corinthians 15:55), quoted verbatim in ‘Draff’ (MPTK 186).
‘mental note’: reflecting Beckett’s own creative practice of ‘notesnatching’ from his reading (letter to MacGreevy, early August 1931).
‘Limbo’: where those who are not saved but did not sin reside; in Dante’s Inferno, the first circle of hell. Cf. Dream (44, 50, 63, 181 and 188) and the poem ‘Casket of Pralinen’ (CP 32).
‘nip in the wombbud’: anticipating Mr Rooney’s question in ‘All That Fall’: ‘Did you ever wish to kill a child? [. . .] Nip some young doom in the bud’ (25).
‘cyanosis’: cf. ‘cynasoed [sic] face’ (DN 1020); Beckett’s source is Sir William Osler’s The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), designed for the use of practitioners and students of medicine, and specifically the section on ‘Alcoholism’. Cyanosis is an effect of excessive alcohol consumption. The word or versions of the word appear in Dream (62), the poems ‘For Future Reference’ and ‘Casket of Pralinen’ (CP 28 and 32), the story ‘Love and Lethe’ (MPTK 92) and Murphy (98).
‘glump like a fluke in a tup’: Irish slang for ‘sulk like a worm in a gut’.
‘Gonococcus’: the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the cause of gonorrhoea.
‘three score years and ten’: seventy years, traditionally seen as the span of life, as in Psalm 90:10.
‘hot cockles’: related to the saying ‘to warm the cockles of your heart’; in this context a scorning of the seeking for happiness.
‘Réchauffé cockles’: reheated cockles of the heart, so to speak.
‘Communist painter and decorator’: who also appears in Dream (219).
‘she spouts, the Mick I know’: a further reference to Melville’s Moby-Dick.
‘great greedy wild free human heart’: said of Luther in Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (370), as noted in DN: ‘the great greedy wild free human heart of him’ (281). Cf. Dream (196).
‘embarrassed caterpillar . . . origins’: as the reference to ‘origins’ implies, Beckett alludes to Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he read in summer 1932. In chapter VII on ‘Instinct’, Darwin describes the findings of his colleague Huber, who observed that if a caterpillar were interrupted in building its hammock and taken to another at an earlier or similar point of completion, it would simply finish the work from where it had left off; ‘if, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any benefit from this, it was much embarrassed, and in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work’ (my emphasis). Beckett also uses the anecdote in Murphy, as Miss Counihan stops in mid-sentence, and will have to go back to the beginning ‘like Darwin’s caterpillar’ (130).
‘smoke the reference’: cf. Fielding, Tom Jones, where the expression occurs more than once (e.g. IV, 10).
‘Monkeybrand’: brand of soap. Beckett had originally written ‘Monkeyface’ in the typescript.
‘ostentatiously eased’: the pressure on Doyle’s bladder increasing.
‘clockwork’: in Dream, Balzac’s world is described as being populated by ‘clockwork cabbages’ (119) and the character Chas is a ‘clockwork fiend’ (203). In ‘A Wet Night’ this is replaced by ‘this clockwork Bartlett’ (MPTK 50).
‘voice’: Belacqua becomes a ‘voice’; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses only the voice and then the bones remain of Echo as she pines away.
‘eyes full of tears’: in ‘What a Misfortune’, Belacqua’s eyes are ‘moist’ after Hairy Quin told him that ‘You perish in your own plenty’ (MPTK), the quotation deriving from Augustine (III, xii) and entered in DN: ‘The son of these tears shall not perish’ (89). This in turn is connected with the ‘babies’ in Zaborovna’s eyes.
‘mewl’: whimper of an infant child.
‘buckled discourse’: in a letter of early September 1931 Beckett told MacGreevy that ‘one has to buckle the wheel of one’s poem somehow or run the risk of Nordau’s tolerance’ (LSB I 87). Beckett had recently read Max Nordau’s book Degeneration (1892).
‘honour your father . . . Göthe’: cf. Renard, Journal (22 February 1890), ‘Honore ton père, et ta mère, et Virgile’, underlined in Beckett’s personal copy and entered into DN (214). It appears in Dream (178) with Goethe substituted for Virgil, as here.
‘Bright . . . wind’: quoting line 7 of Tennyson’s poem ‘The Poet’s Mind’, of which several lines are quoted in DN (1159) and Dr
eam (87).
‘Keyed up’: ‘to regulate the pitch of the strings of a musical instrument’ (OED). Frequently, as here, used figuratively to raise up or stimulate feelings or thoughts. Here Belacqua is in such a state of excitement that he (or his strings) threatens to ‘snap’.
‘error, or, better, blunder’: adapting a line copied into DN (37), ‘Worse than a crime, a blunder’, taken from Lockhart (255), who is in turn quoting Fouché on the execution of the Duke d’Enghien in 1804. The phrase ‘Butter was a blunder’ appears in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (MPTK 12).
‘throat olive convulsed’: i.e. the Adam’s apple; the word ‘throat-olive’ is in DN (526), quoting Giles, The Civilisation of China (131).
‘bumped off’: as Belacqua was in the story ‘Yellow’.
‘Horror! It was dawning’: like Hamlet’s ghost, Belacqua must depart before it dawns.
‘Dawn, aborting’: as the cow did earlier.
‘layette’: ‘A complete outfit of garments, toilet articles, and bedding for a new-born child’ (OED).
‘Pfui’: German for ‘yuck’.
‘bist Du nicht willig’: German for ‘if you are not willing’; quoting Goethe’s poem ‘Erlkönig’ – the line in the original continues ‘then I’ll use force’.
‘Bating’: meaning ‘except’, the word also appears in ‘Dante and Lobster’ and ‘What a Misfortune’ (MPTK 17 and 139).
‘inaudible’: having asked Zaborovna to ‘speak up’, Belacqua now cannot hear what Doyle is saying; as above based on Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, who is ‘chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco (hoarse from long silence)’ (TCD MS10966/1, 1r).
‘de rigueur’: French, required by custom or fashion.
‘crazy old chronology’: a common complaint in Beckett’s early writing; cf. the criticism of the ‘lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect’ in Dream (10).
‘begin with the Dove and end up with the Son’: a reference to the Annunciation where the Holy Spirit appears to the Virgin Mary as a dove.
‘passes my persimmon’: i.e. ‘passes my comprehension’, citing Thomas de Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, as noted in DN: ‘It passes my persimmon to say . . .’ (718). Also used in Dream (49).
‘keep your bake shut’: Dublin slang for ‘keep your mouth shut’; the phrase is in DN (641) and used in Dream (115).
‘Game ball . . . again’: i.e. game over; ‘again’ as the phrase has been used by the vagabond in ‘Walking Out’ (MPTK 104), where it prematurely ends a conversation.
‘pastoral days’: referring to the story ‘Walking Out’, which describes Belacqua’s trip to the Dublin mountains.
‘Thanatos’: Greek for death.
‘reintegrate the matrix’: an entry in DN, taken from Gaultier’s De Kant à Nietzsche (6), reads: ‘Monotheistic fiction bicuspid: Bible & Plato: torn by the forceps of Sophism from the violated matrix of Pure Reason . . . !’ (1149).
‘death came and undid me’: cf. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’ (ll. 62–3); itself, as Eliot’s note indicates, from Dante’s Inferno: ‘And behind it came so long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many’ (III, 55–7).
‘velleities’: wish or inclination without action or effort. T. S. Eliot uses the word in the poem ‘Portrait of a Lady’. Also found in Dream (43 and 152).
‘gull . . . Gael’: possibly playing on Gall and Gael, foreigner in or native of Ireland.
‘did after all reach forth’: reprising the story of the doubter Thomas.
‘they all do’: with a possible nod toward the title of Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte. Also in Dream (223) and ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 69).
‘dust of a dove’s heart’: noted in DN (865) and taken from Burton (III, 132). Applied in Dream to the Smeraldina (31) and the Alba (111).
‘Nichol’s box’: the firm of undertakers responsible for the burial of Beckett’s father, William Beckett, was called Nichols and Co.
‘saturnine’: used here both in the sense of ‘gloomy’ and as relating to lead.
‘agitato’: Latin for ‘agitated’, used in music as a dynamic marking.
‘Gottlob’: German for ‘Thank heavens’.
‘knock-about’: the word appears, without hyphen, in Beckett’s 1934 review of Sean O’Casey’s Windfalls (Dis 82).
‘show a glim’: cf. Dickens, Oliver Twist: ‘Show a glim, Toby’.
‘Adam that good old man . . . service’: quoting Orlando’s words to Adam in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (II, iii) – ‘O good old man’ – whom he also praises for his ‘constant service’.
‘Light and sweetness’: cited in a letter to Nuala Costello of 27 February 1934 (with ‘obliterate gloom’ rather than as here ‘obliterate dole’); possibly from Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), according to which the aim of culture is ‘to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’.
‘consume like a spider away’: entered in DN as ‘to consume away like a spider (soul)’ (135), and taken from Augustine (VII, x). Cf. Dream (68, 73).
‘greasing the palm of some saint’: Beckett is possibly referring to the practice of having to pay to see paintings in churches; a version of votive candles.
‘Give it a name’: colloquial for ‘what would you like to drink’, also used in Dream (203) and ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 51).
‘link-boy’: in the days before street lighting, boys who would carry flaming torches to light the way for pedestrians.
‘anxiomaniac’: the word ‘anxiomania’, meaning ‘frenzied anguish’, is noted in DN (659), taken from Nordau’s Degeneration (226).
‘flaws of tramontane’: adapting a note in DN, ‘flaws of wind (Little Dorrit)’ (1036), from ch. 9 of Dickens’s novel. ‘Tramontane’ is the Italian for a north wind. Cf. Dream (139) and ‘Yellow’ (MPTK 163).
‘cabal of vipers’: a reference to François Mauriac’s novel Le Nœud de vipères (The Knot of Vipers, 1932).
‘Mark Disney’: thinking of Walt Disney?
‘Goldwasser’: a liqueur produced in Danzig; in Dream, the barmaid Eva prefers Goldwasser to Steinhäger (99).
‘buttoned up’: Beckett is referring here to Beethoven, both in terms of the letter in which the composer ‘unbuttoned’ himself, as well as the so-called ‘unbuttoned’ Seventh Symphony. DN contains the entry ‘the 7th & 8th aufgeknoepft’ (1107), taken from Romain Rolland’s Vie de Beethoven. Cf. Dream (138, 188 and 227) and ‘What a Misfortune’ (MPTK 140).
‘to bite it off’: with a nod towards an entry in DN (819), adapted from Burton (II, 186): ‘The beaver bites off his balls – that he may live’. It reappears in Dream as ‘a very persuasive chapter of Natural History’ (63), and in Murphy (129).
‘handful of stones’: in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo, scorned by Narcissus, wastes away until only her voice and her bones, changed to stones, remain.
‘snuff of candle’: quoting Burton (II, 151), as evidenced by a note in DN: ‘his memory stinks like the snuff of a candle’ (816). Cf. Dream (120).
‘So it goes in the world’: the story ends with a repetition of one of Beckett’s favourite sentiments taken from the Brothers Grimm story ‘How the Cat and the Mouse Set Up House’.
LETTERS FROM CHARLES PRENTICE
AT CHATTO & WINDUS
TO SAMUEL BECKETT
Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett, 25 SEPTEMBER 1933
[UoR MS 2444/Letter Book 150/134–5]
Dear Sam,
Chatto’s would be delighted to publish the stories, and we would like to make you the following offer. Short stories are chancey things, on which the library and the bookseller turn a poached-egg eye. So it is a little difficult to suggest an advance, especially as ‘Proust’ has earned only two-thirds of his, but I hope that £25 will seem to you fair. [. . .]
The book is just long enough to sell at 7/6d., and we’d publish
early next year. [. . .]
Can you think of a livelier title? I don’t suppose many people know what ‘Draff’ is, but if they look it up, they will be put off.
[. . .]
Hurray too if you manage that extra story. [. . .]
Yours ever,
Charles
Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett, 29 SEPTEMBER 1933
[UoR MS 2444/Letter Book 150/196–7]
Dear Sam,
[. . .]
Many thanks for giving so amiable a think to the title of the book. We also prefer ‘More Pricks than Kicks’. It’s much better than ‘Draff’, I am sure, but if you light on another, the substitution can easily be made. [. . .]
Another 10,000 words, or even 5,000 for that matter, would, I am certain, help the book, and it would be lovely if you manage to reel them out. It would be necessary to have the complete MS. before sending it to the printers, in order that they could plan accurately the requisite number of pages. But we could easily wait a month or six weeks before sending the MS. off, and doubtless you’ll know by then whether an addition is possible or not.
Yours ever,
Charles
Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett, 4 OCTOBER 1933
[UoR MS 2444/Letter Book 150/245]
My dear Sam,
[. . .]
I’m delighted that Belacqua Lazarus will be walking again shortly. Let me shake him by the hand as soon as you can buy a ticket for him. Will his next appearance be a prick or a kick? The more I think of it, the more I like that title. [. . .]
Yours ever,
Charles
Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett, 2 NOVEMBER 1933
[UoR MS 2444/Letter Book 151/138]
Dear Sam,
[. . .]
‘Echo’s Bones’ is a tasty title, and, from the tone of your postcard, I infer that the 10,000 yelps will soon be parcelled up and on their way to Holyhead. Good for Belacqua. Give him up? What next! [. . .]
Yours ever,
Charles
Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett, 10 NOVEMBER 1933