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 .

Beckett
Writing
Beckett

A
 Also by H. Porter Abbott:

Diary Fiction: Writing as Action

The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect

 Beckett
Writing
Beckett
The Author in the Autograph

H. Porter Abbott

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1996 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof,
must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street,
Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1996 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abbott, H. Porter.
Beckett writing Beckett: the author in the autograph / H. Porter Abbott,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8014-3246-4 (alk. paper)
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Autobiography in
literature. 3. Self in literature. I. Title.
PR6003.E282Z53 1996
848'.91409—dc20 95-39559
 In memory of
Barbara Trueblood Abbott
 .

, .

■
 Contents

Preface v
ix

One
Narratricide
1

Two *
Beckett and Postmodernism
23

Three v
The Wild Beast of Earnestness
52

Four
Engendering Krapp
63

Five
Original Mud
87

Six
Writing Scripts
109

Seven
Political Beckett
127

Vll
Vlll Contents

Eight

Supernatural Beckett
149

Nine *

The Reader in the Autograph

165

Abbreviations
185

Chronology
187

Index
191
 Preface

All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have
made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in
order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone.
—The Unnamable

So who wants to speak of whom, then? Do we dare say, This is

Beckett, and he wants to speak of Beckett? Such a statement fairly
bristles with insuperable problems. So well have we been schooled,
for so long and in so many ways, that hardly can we imagine saying
these ten modest words without feeling overwhelmed in advance by
semantic misery. Still, though I would not commit to precisely these
words, it is nonetheless the case that Beckett always pulls us back
to the question of who speaks. And though there is, assuredly, no
unimpeachable answer to this question, this book is dedicated to the
proposition that the sustained originality of Beckett’s work can be
best understood as self-writing or, as I much prefer to call it, auto-
graphical action.
My argument is intended to contribute to two subjects: to Beckett
studies and to the study of that broad terrain of self-writing which
goes by the name of autobiography. There has been hardly any work
yoking these two subjects, and where such work does exist, it usually
aims at identifying traces, that is, it has been a historical enterprise,
aligning fictional texts with the personal history that went into them.
This has been the case most notably in Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett:
A Biography, though from the early 1960s books and articles on
Beckett have built up a web of connections between the work and
the life. Such readings can, at a stroke, put a whole new light on a
work, as for example when Hugh Kenner surmised that the aborted
meeting with Godot came out of Beckett’s work in the Resistance.
 X Preface

The price we pay for this kind of autobiographical approach can be

sadness as we see art shrinking into the epiphenomenal residue of a
single life’s contingencies. As I hope will become quickly clear in the
following pages, the autographical reading that I am proposing is
diametrically opposed to such an approach. It responds to writing
not as a mode of recovery or reconstruction or even fictionalizing of
the past but as a mode of action taken in the moment of writing.
The term “autobiography,” with its middle syllable “bio,” is liter¬
ally self-life-writing. It carries with it the strong connotation of a life
story, written by the one who lived that life. Autobiography in the
sense of a memoir or life story is something Beckett had few illusions
about, and the inadequacy of life stories is a theme that recurs
throughout his oeuvre. So a better term than “autobiography” is
“self-writing” and, better still, “autography,” which avoids not only
the implications of historical narrative in “bio” but also the semantic
baggage of “self,” a term as problematical for Beckett as the term
“story.” Preferable to all these is the coinage “autographical action,”
for it concentrates attention on the text, both as “self”-writing and
as immediate action taking place as it is written.
In Beckett’s case, an autographical reading puts his artistic origi¬
nality well into the foreground. Beckett’s inexhaustible capacity to
“make strange” was a key element in a project that began to take
shape early in his writing career but that was consolidated in the
1950s. The chapters that follow—each of them a different take on
the subject—draw largely from this later work. But Beckett may well
have been thinking of writing as a life project as early as the 1920s.
Doubtless, he was encouraged to think this way by the examples of
the two modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, within
whose combined shadows he first began to write seriously. From the
- perspective of my project here, what stayed with him most was an
attitude of extraordinary intimacy with his art, as if “being in the
text,” to use Paul Jay’s evocative phrase, were somehow possible.
At the age of twenty-six, in his monograph on Proust, Beckett
describes the author as inhabiting his work like a “pure subject,”
foliating in his “vegetable” composition in the same way as Vinteuil
grew his music from the inside. The next year (1932), in Dream of
Fair to Middling Women, his first novel, Beckett (the puckish
 Preface xi

ephebe?) describes his own textual being as a kind of vermin. He is

a “skymole” tunneling in “its firmament in genesis”; he is an “insis¬
tent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art
surface.” The metaphor was to stay with him. In the late sixties, he
told Alec Reid, “It would be impossible for me to talk about my
writing because I am constantly working in the dark, ... it would
be like an insect leaving his cocoon.” At the same time, he told
Charles Juliet that as an author he was like “a mole in a molehill.”
The composite figure is powerfully suggestive. A small, burrowing
creature, Beckett within his work is at once elusive, busy, threaten¬
ing, purposive, blind, trapped, buried alive.

The seed for this book was a plenary lecture given at the Interna¬
tional Beckett Conference at the University of Stirling, Scotland, in
1986. So my thanks go first to the organizers of that conference,
Lance St. John Butler and Robin Davis, for giving me a large captive
audience on which to test my ideas. That lecture, many times re¬
vised, is Chapter 1. I am also grateful for words of encouragement
which have come my way since then. Those whose words stand out
in memory, though they may have long forgotten what they said,
are Enoch Brater, Ruby Cohn, Marjorie Perloff, and Garrett Stewart.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Academic Senate
of the University of California, Santa Barbara, provided welcome
support during the period in which this book came together. And
once again I have enjoyed the friendly and efficient assistance of the
editorial staff at Cornell University Press. My research assistant,
Peter Lengyel, did double duty, turning up interesting leads and
providing friendly intellectual resistance. Finally, special thanks to
three close friends: Jon Pearce, who read every single word and led
me to change more than a few; David Gordon, who reads my argu¬
ments with empathetic understanding tempered by common sense;
and Anita Abbott, who is always my first reader.
A version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Narratricide: Samuel Beckett
as Autographer” in Romance Studies, no. 11 (Winter 1987); a version
of Chapter 2 appeared as “Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the
Art of the Oeuvre” in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and
Postmodern Drama, ed. Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn (Ann Arbor:
Xll Preface

University of Michigan Press), copyright © by the University of

Michigan 1990; a version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Beginning
Again: The Post-Narrative Art of Texts for Nothing and How It Is’ in
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling, © Cambridge
University Press 1994, reprinted with the permission of Cambridge
University Press; a version of Chapter 6 appeared as “Tyranny and
Theatricality: The Example of Samuel Beckett” in Theatre Journal
40 (March 1988), reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins
University Press; a version of Chapter 8 appeared as “Consorting
with Spirits: The Arcane Craft of Beckett’s Later Drama” in The
Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, ed. Enoch Brater
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), copyright © by the Uni¬
versity of Michigan 1995. Parts of Chapter 9 have been revised from
“Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett’s
Art” in Modern Drama 34 (March 1991).
The author and publisher are grateful to Grove/Atlantic, Inc. for
permission to quote from the following works by Samuel Beckett:
Collected Shorter Plays, copyright © 1984 by Samuel Beckett; End¬
game, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press; Waiting for Godot, copy¬
right © 1954 by Grove Press. Acknowledgment is also given to Faber
and Faber, Ltd. for permission to quote from these works.
The author and publisher are grateful to Grove/Atlantic, Inc. for
permission to quote from these additional works by Samuel Beckett:
Company, copyright © 1980 by Samuel Beckett; How It Is, copyright
© 1964 by Grove Press; Stories and Texts for Nothing, copyright ©
1967 by Samuel Beckett; Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Un-
namable, copyright © 1955, 1956, 1958 by Grove Press. Acknowl¬
edgment is also given to the Samuel Beckett Estate and to The Calder
Educational Trust, London, for permission to quote from these
works and from Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Prose, copy¬
right © 1984 by Samuel Beckett.
The author and publisher are grateful, finally, to the Samuel
Beckett Estate for permission to quote from the “Ohio Impromptu
Holograph.”

H. Porter Abbott

Santa Barbara, California

Beckett
Writing
Beckett
-
 One

Narratricide

One may really indeed say that this is the essence of genius, of being
most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking
and listening.
—Gertrude Stein

The rarity of the word “autobiography” in Beckett studies should

come as no surprise. For all his protestations of impotence and in¬
competence, Beckett was an exacting craftsman, and the power of
his art seems directly proportional to its thorough transmutation of
autobiographical sources. S. E. Gontarski’s study of the evolution of
Beckett’s dramatic manuscripts shows in case after case “the inten¬
tional undoing” of personal material, “not so much to disguise auto¬
biography as to displace and discount it.”1 Beckett’s own determina-

'S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Blooming¬
ton: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3-4. Important recent exceptions are Ann Beer’s
“Beckett’s ‘Autography’ and the Company of Languages,” Southern Review 27 (Autumn
1991) : 771-791; James Olney’s “Memory and the Narrative Imperative, St. Augustine and
Samuel Beckett,” New Literary History 24 (Autumn 1993): 857-880; and Richard Begam’s
impressive rereading of the “pentalogy,” Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stan¬
ford: Stanford University Press, 1996). See also Alfred Hornung’s “Fantasies of an Auto¬
biographical Self: Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Federman, Samuel Beckett,” Journal of
Beckett Studies 11/12 (1989): 91-107. Two other related approaches to Beckett’s work are
those of Didier Anzieu and Enoch Brater. Anzieu’s psychobiographical study reads Beck¬
ett’s oeuvre as a continuation of the self-analysis begun when Beckett visited Dr. Wilfred
Bion in 1934-36; see Anzieu, Beckett et le psychanalyste (Paris: Mentha/Archimbaud,
1992) . Brater, in nuanced readings of Beckett’s later work argues that Beckett, reinventing

1
2 Beckett Writing Beckett

tion to keep silent about himself reinforces this view, and certainly
some of the distress that greeted Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beckett,
whatever the accuracy of its biographical facts, lay in the emphasis
it placed on those facts and the corollary implication that, if Beck¬
ett’s art was not reducible to the story of his life, knowing that story
was the main prerequisite to understanding the art.21
In this book, I argue that if Beckett’s postwar endeavor is not
conventional autobiography it is nonetheless best understood not as
fiction but as a species of autography (self-writing). My working
distinction between autography and autobiography is that^auto-
graphy is the larger field comprehending all self-writing and that
autobiography is a subset of autography comprehending narrative
self-writing and more specifically that most common narrative, the
story of one’s life. In this chapter, I locate the comparatively late text
Company (1980), and by implication the work of Beckett’s maturity
(especially as it took shape following the death in 1948 of Beckett’s
reluctant autobiographer, Malone), in another subset of autography.
It is a subset that includes texts by Saint Augustine and William
Wordsworth and that stands in contrast to the much more fully
populated subset (autobiography), for which I have selected Ed¬
mund Gosse’s Father and Son as a representative text. The differ¬
ences between these subsets are rooted in fundamentally opposed
strategies of self-representation and include striking differences be¬
tween the way the autographers approach narrative and (what is
almost the same thing) the way they handle what can be called,
broadly, oedipal material. Company is a key work for this purpose
because it appears to “gravitate,” to adapt John Pilling’s words,

the lyric, spoke to us in his own voice; see Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style
in the Theater (New York: Oxford, 1987) and The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction
(New York: Oxford, 1994).

2“I wrote the biography of Beckett because I was dissatisfied with existing studies of his
writings. ... It seemed to me that many of the leading Beckett interpreters substituted
their own brilliant intellectual gymnastics for what should have been solid, responsible
scholarship; that they created studies that told more about the quality of the authors’
minds than about Beckett’s writings. This exasperating situation made me aware of the
need for a factual basis for all subsequent critical exegesis” (Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett:
A Biography [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978], xii).
 Narratricide 3

“more openly towards the genre of autobiography than anything

before it.”3 In my argument, this appearance works to disassemble
autobiography altogether while at the same time continuing the au-
tographical project the author has been engaged in all along.
It will help clarify this argument if we shift attention for a mo¬
ment from issues of literary form to issues of literary response or
orientation. Such a shift was implicit when Georges Gusdorf argued
in 1956 that there is a gulf separating biography from autobiogra¬
phy. They may be very similarly formed, but the way we read
them—what we look for, how we organize them as we read, what
kind of significance we find in them—is quite different. To read
biographically is to be oriented toward history, toward a sequence
of events now past, but to read autobiographically is to be oriented
not toward the past but toward a continual revelation of authorial
consciousness at the moment of writing.4 Gusdorf’s distinction is
acute, though it is not (as Gusdorf would agree) an automatic pre¬
dictor of how we actually relate to texts that call themselves autobi¬
ographies. Even though an autobiographer cannot be trusted as a
historian and even though he or she may be much more interesting
rhetorically than historically, we do frequently find ourselves reading
an autobiography as history. Autobiographers themselves, much
more commonly than not, see themselves as engaged in writing his¬
tory. As the late-eighteenth-century coinage “auto-biography” im¬
plies, they see themselves as the biographers of themselves. For this
reason, the assurance of historical accuracy quickly became one of
the conventions of the genre.5

3John Pilling, “ ‘Company’ by Samuel Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies 7 (Spring

1982): 127.

“Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions et Limites de l’autobiographie” in Formen der Selbst-

darstellung, ed. G. Reichenkron and E. Haase (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1956);
translated as “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” trans. James Olney, in Autobiog¬
raphy: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 28-48.

5With deconstruction, confidence in the referential and historical reliability of autobi¬

ography has shrunk at times to zero. For a subtly inflected counterargument on the
subject of historical reference in autobiography, see Paul John Eakin, Touching the World:
Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
4 Beckett Writing Beckett

Unwriting History

At the outset of Father and Son, Edmund Gosse declares that “the
following narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious
attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is scrupulously
true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to publish it would be to
trifle with all those who may be induced to read it.”6 Gosse tells
how he gradually separated his identity from that of his charismatic,
fundamentalist father, settling on those key formative moments in
the story of his life—the discovery' of his father’s fallibility, the death
of his mother, his baptism—which led to the critical moment at age
sixteen when his soul became his o wn. Leaning out of the window in
eager anticipation of some sign at last from the Lord, Gosse receives
nothing but the sights and sounds of a summer afternoon. “From
that moment forth,” he writes, “my father and I, though the fact
was long successfully concealed from him and even from myself,
walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul.”7
Gosse, one of the modern architects of the biographical mode,
looked on his own life story as an application of that mode to the
intimate history of his self. But as readers we have at least two
choices. We can accept the document as history (whether accurate
or not) and read it as autobiography. Or we can read it autographi-
cally. If we choose to do the latter, we read FatherUnd Son in a way
that I am sure Gosse did not intend us to: that is, read it with an eye
not to a history of events now past but to an author doing something
in the present at every point in his text. We can see the text, to
invoke Elizabeth Bruss’s powerful concept, as an “autobiographical
act.”8 To read Gosse in this way means seeing his text not as the

6Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 5.

7Gosse, Father and Son, 207.

8Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Bal¬
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). This book by Bruss, particularly her intro¬
duction, Gusdorf’s essay, and volume 1 of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (trans. K.
McLaughlin and D. Pellauer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]) are three semi¬
nal works behind the approach applied in this book. Two other important studies gov¬
erned by an idea of autographical action are Paul Jay’s Being in the Text: Self-Representa-
 Narratricide 5

history of an achieved sense of identity but as an assertion of iden¬

tity, as a declaration to his readers, including perhaps most impor¬
tantly the author himself, that the separation from his father re¬
corded in the last sentences of Chapter 11 did in fact take place.
Inside this declarative act are tucked others. One very important one
is a demonstration of the idea that history can be rendered in the
shape of a story. It is an idea that Gosse learned from, among others,
his father. Gosse’s refinement is to replace his father’s creationist
masterplot with an evolutionary one.9 Moreover, as the story asserts
the evolution of Edmund as a species superior to that of his evolu-
tionarily unfit father, the narrative itself is a demonstration of Ed¬
mund’s superiority as a scientist, a case study that accommodates
the complexity of life on earth in ways that his brilliant but simplistic
father could never do.
One point readily extrapolated from this brief analysis of Father
and Son is that, though it is possible to read almost any text in the\
autographical mode (as you could even read my text, right now, in
the autographical mode), most texts, even those that are coded as
autobiographies, are not consciously autographical. However, inti-

tionfrom Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) and Louis
Renza’s “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography,” in Olney, ed., Auto¬
biography, 268-295. For further development of the theoretical distinction between “au¬
tobiography” and “autography,” see H. Porter Abbott, “Autobiography, Autography, Fic¬
tion: Toward a Taxonomy of Literary Categories,” New Literary History 19 (Spring 1988):
597-615.
A closely related concept is that of “the middle voice,” a verbal category that falls
between the active and the passive voice. By the act of speaking, the speaker does some¬
thing but does it for him or herself. In the late 1960s, Roland Barthes revived interest in
this ancient linguistic discrimination when he argued that the verb “to write” had evolved
a modern usage in the middle voice. See Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive
Verb?” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Contro¬
versy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970), 134-156. See also Emile Benveniste, “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb,”
in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univer¬
sity ofMiami Press, 1971), 145-151.

9This point is developed well in Roger Porter’s essay “Edmund Gosse’s Father and
Son: Between Form and Flexibility,” Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (September 1975):
174-195.
6 Beckett Writing Beckett

mate the revelations they contain, texts formally designated as auto¬

biographies are generally governed by a historical—that is, a bio¬
graphical—orientation.
There are exceptions. Augustine, though he is frequently credited
with having invented in his Confessions the story form of autobiogra¬
phy as it is commonly told in the Wesp (a series of formative events
leading to a climactic conversion),10 was equally original in the way
he went about undermining that same form. In his meditations on
the paradox of the being and nonbeing of time and in the openness
and uncertainty of his text, he declares his whole project as work in
progress, something happening in a textual present, a prayer in ac¬
tion. When one compares the extent of nonnarrative to that of nar¬
rative discourse in the Confessions, one sees that the former exceeds
the latter by a very wide margin. Paul Ricoeur’s brilliant contrast of
Augustinian and Aristotelian narrative in Time and Narrative shows
how they are essentially antitheses, the former dominated by the
burden of existential time, the latter in effect an escape from time;
the former without an end to give it shape and catharsis, the latter
governed entirely by finality.11 Glancing back at the finality of
Gosse’s text, one sees that its form has more to do with Aristotle
than with Augustine.
Wordsworth’s Prelude is a text that comes much closer than
Gosse’s to the Confessions. Its originating motives are varied and
complex, but its continual return to a voice in the present, its pre¬
ponderance of nonnarrative over narrative discourse, and its stub¬
born resistance to completion over the course of fifty years suggest
an autographical work in progress governed by the same ontological
orientation one finds in Augustine. Most significant in this regard is
what Wordsworth, himself a lover of stories, has done to storytelling

10For an account of this achievement in its historical context, see Georg Misch’s three-
volume study, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes (London:
Routledge, 1950). In his influential 1960 study, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cam¬
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), Roy Pascal used this conception of the Augustin¬
ian tale as a normative framework within which to examine landmark autobiographical
texts.

“Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:5-87.

 Narratricide 7

in The Prelude by, in effect, replacing storytelling with the radically

discontinuous mode of the “spot of time.” Though there are only
two spots specifically referred to as such in the 1805 text, these mo¬
ments are, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrasing, “scatter’d every¬
where.”12 As Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out, the earliest manu¬
scripts of The Prelude were simply compendia of these moments
“massed together and linked desultorily.”13 Later versions of the
poem, though they provide increasing structural support, do not
violate the essential narrative discontinuity that Wordsworth seems
purposefully to have preserved.
The spots of time have been a perennial crux in criticism of The
Prelude, and perhaps nothing indicates how unsympathetic we are
to the autographical indeterminacy they represent than the common
assumption that a satisfactory critical accommodation of these spots
requires a demonstration of how they belong to a single architec¬
tonic unity. Thus, in a famous essay in 1959, Jonathan Bishop in
effect normalized The Prelude for its readership by restoring a sense
of story where the text appears pointedly to have avoided it: “We
have a group of memories; these share a vocabulary of imagery, a
vocabulary which seems to combine into a story, a story which, so
far as it is interpretable, tells of the fears, curiosities, and guilt of
childhood. . . . the repetition of language and situation becomes,
once it is noted, a clue to something further back.”14 Though Bishop
was not in a position to retell the story, just knowing it was there
was somehow reassuring. Subsequent interpretations have achieved
the same reassurance by accommodating the spots to models of
transcendental wholeness. But in doing so, they appropriate Words-

12Bk. XI, line 275 (The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970], 213). For Wordsworth’s full exposition of the concept of spots of time see
Bk. XI, lines 258-389 (pp. 213-216).

13Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1964), 212.

‘“Jonathan Bishop, “Wordsworth and the ‘Spots of Time,’ ” in “The Prelude”: A

Selection of Critical Essays, ed. W. J. Harvey and R. Gravil (London: Macmillan, 1972),
148.
8 Beckett Writing Beckett

worth to a Coleridgean model, and in the process, as Jerome Mc-

Gann in his revisionist critique of romantic scholarship has argued,
they vitiate Wordsworth’s originality by glossing over the impor¬
tance of the nonteleological, the fragmentary, and the accidental in
his work.15
Looking more closely at an exemplary passage in Book XI, one
can see how all the rich potential narrative business having to do
with the death of the writer’s father—material of which Jean Fran¬
cois Marmontel would make such a dramatic, moving, identity¬
shaping story in his posthumous Memoires d’un pere (1804)—is con¬
tracted in The Prelude to one point, ten days before his father’s
death, when Wordsworth waited impatiently on a high summit in
the fields above the highway for a sight of the horses that would
bring him home:

on the grass
I sate, half-shelter’d by a naked wall;
Upon my right hand was a single sheep,
A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there,
With those companions at my side, I watch’d,
Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist
Gave intermitting prospect of the wood
And plain beneath.
(Bk. XI, lines 357-364)

The few words of commentary which Wordsworth provides for this

memory (that it appeared as a chastisement, that it has remained a
source of spiritual restoration) do not, as the attention of genera¬
tions of commentators indicates, mitigate its insistent accidentally.
It is narrative out of narrative. His very phrase “spot of time” sug¬
gests a conversion of the linearity of narrative time to a spatial, spot¬
like condition. Wordsworth compounds this effect when, recurring

15Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1983), 1-56. McGann has developed a provocative continuation of
this argument in his paper “The Biographia Literaria and the Contentions of English
Romanticism,” for a copy of which my thanks to the author. See also Anne K. Mellor,
English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), for a similar per¬
spective on other English romantic writers.
 Narratricide 9

briefly to this spot, he bears down on spots within it: “The single
sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old
stone wall” (XI, lines 378-379). He compounds it again when he
frames the tableau with an abrupt move to the one conceiving it all
in the present, engaged in discourse with his fellow poet Coleridge:
“O Friend, for whom / I travel in these dim uncertain ways / Thou
wilt assist me as a pilgrim gone / In quest of highest truth” (XI, lines
390-393).16
A similar effect of accidental intrusion has continually broken the
surface of Beckett’s published work since early in the forties. His
texts are littered everywhere with the barest fragments of narrative
irrelevancy which lead nowhere and, like Wordsworth’s, frequently
feature objects—a chair, a stone, a dead rat—which augment their
alinear, achronological condition. When Beckett composed Com¬
pany in the late seventies, he methodically foregrounded the practice
in what, consciously or otherwise, parodies The Prelude. Company is
a baffled present-tense discourse on itself (“What visions in the dark
of light! Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims . . .” [C, 16]),
intersected at sixteen points by unrelated spots of time rendered in
the second person.

You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the
hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of
high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For
the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and
were derided. All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in
your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed.
You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your
nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You
close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again.
Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale
sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that
sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light. (C, 25)

^Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. de Selincourt, 216-217. This frame does not appear in
either the earlier two-part MS or the later 1850 MS.
10 Beckett Writing Beckett

Internally one can note here the contracting of this spot in the con¬
tinual focusing and refocusing on a single object, the mountain. This
object in turn is cast into doubt historically both by the derision of
others and by the fact that it emerges in this fragment only as an
image of an image, revived in a room in the dark, and moreover as
an image that appears to have been created by the sheer effort to see
it (“strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there”). Finally,
the rhyme and alliteration of this passage diminish both narrative
and historical attention by accentuating its qualities of sound.
Externally the spot is further denarrativized by the emphatic
blank vacancies of white which set it off in both French and English
texts. At the same time, it is dehistoricized by a containing text that
replaces the term “memory” with the terms “figment” and “imagin¬
ing,” that further dissociates “remembering” into a voice that
“comes to one in the dark,” and that—dissociating further still—
makes the “one” to whom it comes simply part of a “proposition.”
The framing action of Wordsworth the maker reflecting in the pres¬
ent on his “dim uncertain ways” to his companion Coleridge has its
counterpart in Beckett’s frame for this passage: “Deviser of the voice
and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company.
Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he de¬
vises too for company. Leave it at that. Confusion too is company
up to a point” (C, 26).
An additional aspect of this spot is that, by invoking the situation
of one in the dark (in his room in bed) to whom something imag¬
ined comes, it echoes that condition which is the present of this text,
announced in its first words: “A voice comes to one in the dark.
Imagine.” This, too, coaxes us to see this spot of time not as memory
but as words tethered to a textual present. The other spots of time
which make up the representational moments of this text recapitu¬
late the condition of dark enclosure: “[your] hedgehog in its box in
the hutch,” you as a lover waiting “in the little summerhouse,” you
lying on your back with your face “within the tent” of your lover’s
hair, you as an infant in its crib listening as parental murmurs come
down to it, your father on the night of your birth escaping to the
dark coach house and further enclosed in his motorcar (his De Dion
Bouton) “in the dark not knowing what to think” until the voice of
 Narratricide 11

the maid comes to him, in the dark. If all of these moments encour¬
age us to think—and I believe they do, irresistibly—of the fetus in
the womb with voices coming to it in the dark, then it is possible to
see the entire text with its opening assertion (“A voice comes to one
in the dark”) as both created and precreative: it exists, is full of
voices evoking images, yet is at the same time prenatal, in the womb.
In this way, Beckett constructs one of his many transitional spaces
and through it expresses the paradox of being on the verge of
being.17
There is much to pursue along this line, but the main points to
be made before we go on are that Beckett, in a text that invites us
to think of autobiography, repeatedly sabotages both the narrative
character and historical authority of autobiography, and that the
“figments” and “imaginings” that emerge in the text are, as it were,
unborn. Not going anywhere, they remain bound within that origi¬
nal womb in which the text in effect delivers itself. In this regard, the
entire text is a conceptual Mobius strip: “Can the crawling creator
crawling in the same create dark as his creature create while crawl¬
ing?” (C, 52). The question raises the closely allied issue of paternity.

Unwriting the Father

The spot of time in The Prelude which I discussed above occurs at
the only point in the poem where Wordsworth refers to his father.
Critics have frequently remarked on Wordsworth’s “fatherless free¬
dom” (or parentless freedom; references to his mother are almost as
rare), but what is striking at this point in the poem is the accentua¬
tion of that freedom. Wordsworth, for all his fascination with fathers

17For applications of D. W. Winnicott’s concept of a “transitional” or “intermediate

area” to Beckett, see Gabriele Schwab, “The Intermediate Area between Life and Death:
On Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable,” in Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—
Psychoanalysis, ed. K. Woodward and M. Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 205-217; and Patrick J. Casement, “Samuel Beckett’s Relationship to his
Mother-Tongue,” in Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Win-
nicott, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1993), 229-245.
12 Beckett Writing Beckett

and fatherhood in The Prelude,18 refers to his own father only at the
very moment when that father left this world. Moreover, as noted
above, the whole tale of his father’s passing away, with its terrific
sentimental capital, is displaced by an accidental scene featuring the
poet in isolation together with those single objects (a wall, a tree, a
sheep) that echo his singularity. This displacement of the father in a
spatialized moment which is, formally, a displacement of temporal
narrative itself is a combination at the heart of the autographical
subset in which I am placing Beckett.
The oldest narrative of identity, older than the quest, is the narra¬
tive of parents begetting children. “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), and He shaped and prepared
the latter in numerous details until it was a fitting place for the
supreme act of fatherhood (and identity), the act of repeating Him¬
self: “And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion . . .” (Genesis 1:4). Let them
have dominion—that is, let them echo our supreme powers of mak¬
ing, shaping, and control—which, in the second act of this narrative,
his children do by disobedience (by eating apples, by asserting their
difference) and, in the third act, by their own project of begetting,
which, in a shadowy and usually suppressed fourth act, produces
children rebellious in their own turn. The simplest paradigm of this
narrative syntax is found in the “begat structure” of Genesis—“and
I rad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael began Methusael: and Methusael
began Lamech” (Genesis 4:18)—in which the differences of the
nouns of identity alternate with the exact repetition of the verb of
creation. Autobiography, conventionally, has internalized this struc¬
ture and focused on its second act. Thus Benjamin Franklin in his
narrative focuses on his flight from the control of his father and
brother as an essential preliminary to his self-created difference and
dominion over others in Philadelphia. He leaves in the shadows the

l8For Wordsworth’s reiterated interest in fatherhood in this poem, see Richard J. Onor-
ato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in “The Prelude” (Princeton: Princeton Univer¬
sity Press, 1971), 307-332.
 Narratricide 13

son to whom the text was originally addressed (to perfect the au¬
thor’s image in his progeny)—the same son who became, in his
turn, a Royalist. A century later, Edmund Gosse found in Darwinian
evolution, not a repudiation, but a refinement of the Old Testament
syntax of fatherhood, difference, and dominion.
Looking back again at Augustine, one can see a number of ways
in which the Confessions undoes this syntax. Worthy of special note
among them is the way Augustine deals textually with his procre¬
ative father. Whatever tale of conflict with his father there may have
been to tell, it is, as in Wordsworth, replaced by an almost complete
textual erasure of that father. In one of the very few references to
him, Augustine features his father’s delight upon discovering, at the
public baths when his son was sixteen, “the signs of active virility
coming to life in me.” “And this was enough,” he continues, “to
make him relish the thought of having grandchildren.”19 In this way,
his father is very closely identified with the linear paradigm of gener¬
ation and mastery. The key act of Augustine’s conversion is his com¬
mitment to chastity. Abandoning the instrumentality of procreation,
he demonstrates his commitment to a “Father” outside of time and
therefore outside of narrative, a father for whom even the term “fa¬
ther” itself is a probe in the dark, “for even those who are most
gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you.”20 But then,
in the form of his self-writing, Augustine went even further by creat¬
ing a discourse that features the presentness of all its elements. The
text is a radical act of unmastery and openness, swamped from be¬
ginning to end by unanswerable questions, identifying its narrative
fragments with the absolute present of its creation, addressing the
Unnamable and meditating on its own unnamability. It is that rare
form of vulnerable autographic awareness which is repeated in
Wordsworth’s erasure~Both of his procreative father and of the linear

19St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1961), 45.

20Ibid., 23.
14 Beckett Writing Beckett

procreation of narrative. It is, in effect, an autographical attempt to

pull time up into oneself.21
Samuel Beckett, in real life childless by choice, has made the hor¬
ror of fatherhood a theme that recurs throughout his oeuvre. “Chil¬
dren, babies,” says the voice of “The Expelled,” “I personally would
lynch them with the utmost pleasure” (STN, 15-16); Molloy would
happily be rid of his balls, those “decaying circus clowns” (TN, 36);
Hamm “bottles” his “accursed progenitor” (En, 9, 24) and orders
the death of a flea for fear that humanity might start from there all
over again. What my argument does is link this theme to Beckett’s
own autographical attack on narrative. It is a link one finds every¬
where, as for example in “The End” when, in a narrative non sequi-
tur, the reader is suddenly apprised of the existence of progeny:
“One day I caught sight of my son. He was striding along with a
briefcase under his arm. He took off his hat and bowed and I saw
he was as bald as a coot. I was almost certain it was he. I turned
round to gaze after him. He went bustling along on his duck feet,
bowing and scraping and flourishing his hat left and right. The in¬
sufferable son of a bitch” (STN, 58). Not only does each detail here
(his briefcase, his baldness, his bowing and scraping) pointedly work
to disjoin the son from what we know of the father, but the episode
itself in its intrusiveness, its sharp disjunction from all that goes
before and comes after, works to unwrite narrative.
In one of the longer spots of time in Company, Beckett symbolizes
by overlaid images the complete, troubling narrative chain of Gene¬
sis. The passage is devoted to a meeting or tryst in a summerhouse
on a “Cloudless May day.” In a kind of prelude, the voice begins
by describing the hearer as a child who sits with his father in the
summerhouse, engaged in an elementary form of role modeling:

The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge turning
the pages. You on the other with your feet dangling. When he chuck-

2‘Fascinating in this light is Wordsworth’s further displacement of his own fatherhood

with the tale of Vaudracour and Julia in Book IX, a substitution usually accounted for by
other motives (cowardice, prudishness, concern to protect the identities of others).
 Narratricide 15

led you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That
you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and tickled him greatly
and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear
you try to chuckle too. (C, 39)

This passage is conventionally cute but at the same time disturbing,

particularly in the way it invokes, in the last sentence, the drive for
self-replication. It brings to mind Molloy’s Jacques Moran and his
keen desire that his son (Jacques, Jr.) take his exact imprint, espe¬
cially as they undertake the arduous narrative of linear pursuit: “I
wanted him to walk like his father, with little rapid steps, his head
up, his breathing even and economical, his arms swinging, looking
neither to left or right, apparently oblivious to everything and in
reality missing nothing” (TN, 128).22
In the episode in Company, after this prelude, the tryst between
lovers is recorded, and then, in a closing passage, the voice aligns
father, lover, and the possibility of progeny in a spatial conflation of
the master narrative of identity:

The ruby lips do not return your smile. Your gaze descends to the
breasts. You do not remember them so big. To the abdomen. Same
impression. Dissolve to your father’s straining against unbuttoned

22Jacques Moran is so fully embedded in the oedipal matrix that he not only expects
absolute authority but honors the rebellion that is its inevitable complement: “If I had
been my son I would have left me long ago. He was not worthy of me, not in the same
class at all” (TN, 104). Appropriating his son’s knife, he remarks, “He would doubtless at
that moment with pleasure have cut my throat, with that selfsame knife I was putting so
placidly in my pocket. But he was still a little on the young side, my son, a little on the
soft side, for the great deeds of vengeance” (TN, 131).
Thomas J. Cousineau, in his Lacanian reading of Molloy, sees both principal figures of
the text as prisoners of “oedipal logic”: Moran of the Nom du pere, Molloy of the pre-
oedipal yearning for the womb. Answering the question Why does Moran’s narrative
follow Molloy’s? Cousineau proposes that Moran at the end of the book has the possibility
not only to free himself of the Law of Youdi but also to opt not to connect with Molloy
and the yearning for stasis and death. Cousineau’s is an original departure from most
readings of the structure of Molloy, but in its very argument it reinstates a progressive
linear orientation that can itself be linked to oedipal logic (“It now remains for Moran to
free himself and his language from the marks of fear and subservience which point to
their origin but not to their destiny”). See Cousineau, “Molloy and the Paternal Meta¬
phor,” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Spring 1983): 91.
16 Beckett Writing Beckett

waistband. Can it be she is with child without your having asked for
as much as her hand? (C, 42).

In dissolving to the father’s unbuttoned waistband from the lover’s

swelling womb, the scene expresses the condition of being locked
fore and aft in an implacable biological chain of identity. One be¬
comes a link in this chain by the agendy of one’s own natural desires
and in spite of one’s best intentions.23
The moment ends with a shot of the fictive hearer sitting in an
attitude of symbolic rejection of this master narrative: with “eyes
closed and your hands on your pubes.” But, as I have been arguing,
not only is fatherhood thematically rejected, but the moment itself
participates in an erasure of fatherhood’s formal analogue—
narrative. Only by laying waste story itself does one create the op¬
portunity of finding oneself outside an ancient story that absorbs all
identity into its relentless functioning. Like all the other narrative
seeds that we have been calling spots of time, this tableau is also
labeled, not a memory, but an “imagining,” sealed from narrative
intercourse with the others, packed away in thick swathes of blank
space and then packed still further in layers of discursive insulation
that repeatedly stress its fabricated, propositional, wholly unverifi-
able nature.
An important tangential point in this analysis is that the erasure
of fatherhood in this subset of autography is at a Copernican remove
from the oedipal struggle with the father. Take, for example, the
baptism scene in Gosse’s Father and Son. Before the eyes of the as¬
sembled congregation, the ten-year-old prodigy descends into the
baptismal tank, his tiny feet splashing, held in the “Titanic arms” of
the minister, and emerges an insufferable little Baptist. It was, as
the author remarks, “the central event of my whole childhood.”24

23This construction is given emphasis in the French translation: “A son ventre. Meme
impression. II se fond dans celui de ton pere debordant de la ceinture deboutonnee”
(Compagnie [Paris: Minuit, 1980], 57). Where in the English text the filmic locution
“dissolve to” foregrounds the constructedness of this “memory,” ”se fond dans” sacrifices
that foregrounding to stress the organic connection of the two images.

24Gosse, Father and Son, 129.

 Narratricide 17

Immersion in the model of fatherhood allowed him to proceed to

those other narrative points well beyond the evolution of his partic¬
ular father and finally to recount the scene itself with that fatherly
distance and compassion that forgives as it diminishes his childlike
father. Absolutely according to form, the attack on the father con¬
firms the model of fatherhood and the narrative syntax from which
it is inseparable.
“You stand at the tip of the high board,” says the voice in Com¬
pany:

High above the sea. In it your father’s upturned face. Upturned to

you. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to
jump. He calls, Be a brave boy. The red round face. The thick mus¬
tache. The greying hair. The swell sways it under and sways it up
again. The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From
the water and from the bathing place. (C, 18)

Putting this scene in its entirety (as it is here) beside Gosse’s baptism
makes the contrast vivid. In Company, we have, in essence, an action
that does not take place—no jump occurs. Nor, and this is equally
important, is it the record of a refusal to jump (nothing in the scene
indicates such a construction either). It is the not-taking-place of a
following of a father’s command. It is the not-taking-on of an iden¬
tity (“Be a brave boy”). It is the nonoccurrence of a baptism of total i
immersion with a father before the witness of many (“Many eyes ]
upon you”). Moreover, regardless of what we may dig up in the way |
of biographical details from Beckett’s past, this nonoccurrence does ,
not happen in any past time, in any “then” of narrative, but is a
textual nonevent in a textual present. And its internal repudiation
of any belonging in any story is compounded by its condition as a
“spot” of time, externally sealed from meaningful, sequential narra¬
tive connection with any of the other spots in Company.

Writing for Company

In summary, what I am proposing is a fundamental categorical shift

in our reading of Beckett, one that moves him out of fiction alto-
18 Beckett Writing Beckett

gether and relocates him in that rarely occupied subset of auto¬

graphy which I have identified with key texts by Augustine and
Wordsworth. These texts are as distant from fiction as they are from
conventional autobiography insofar as conventional autobiography
is as given to the comforts and authorial distance enabled by fic¬
tional form as are traditional novels. Beckett’s subset is writing gov¬
erned not by narrative form or any species of tropological wholeness
but by that unformed intensity of being in the present which at
every point in the text seeks to approach itself. Writing under such
governance, Beckett must, to use Gontarski’s phrase, “undo” auto¬
biography. Yet this undoing is not to the end of fictional creation
but to the end of being Beckett, Beckett as it were avant la lettre,
Beckett before he is Beckett.25
Company, which appears at first glance to come much closer to
autobiography than does Beckett’s other work, actually serves to
make clearer what he has been doing all along. As to what inspira¬
tion or crisis brought Company into existence late in the seventies,
we can only speculate. Deirdre Bair has suggested that the publica¬
tion of her biography of Beckett in 1978 may have had a significant
influence on this particular text. I think she is quite possibly right,
though we differ on the character of that influence. Bair suggests
that her biography may have liberated Beckett to the extent that “he
can now admit to a truthful use of biographical self-analysis as the
material for his fiction without any further need to hide behind
layers of disguised prose devices.”26 In my view, if Bair’s biography

25This formulation, together with the implication that Company takes place in a womb,
are in close accord with the words attributed to Beckett by Lawrence Harvey to the effect
that “life on the surface was ‘existence by proxy’ ” and that “along with this sense of
existence by proxy goes ‘an unconquerable intuition that being is so unlike what one is
standing up,’ an intuition of ‘a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might
have been but never got born, an etre manque.’ ” In the context of a whole range of
current discourse on Beckett, but particularly discourse starting from poststructuralist
assumptions, Beckett’s alleged words represent a problem that is usually ignored. I take
up this issue further in the next chapter. See Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet
and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 247.

26Deirdre Bair, “ ‘Back the Way He Came ... or in Some Quite Different Direction’:
Company in the Canon of Samuel Beckett’s Writing,” Pennsylvania English: Essays in Film
and the Humanities 9 (Fall 1982): 18.
 Narratricide 19

is at all involved, then Company is best seen as a response or emer¬

gency action, occasioned by the imminence of a narrative presenting
itself as the story of Samuel Beckett’s life. In the preface to her biog¬
raphy, Bair in passing remarks of her subject, “I am sure he did not
want this book to be written and would have been grateful if I had
abandoned it.”27 There was much more than simple human reti¬
cence or shyness in this desire, for if my argument is correct, then
her work would have threatened roughly forty years of concentrated
endeavor.
In proposing this argument—that for many years Beckett was
consciously engaged in autography—I have also proposed that in
Beckett’s subspecies of autography the whole structure of oedipal
conflict undergoes erasure. The signs of originary force which so
absorbed Beckett’s attention throughout his life achieve a configu¬
ration, not within a dialectic of parent and self, but outside of it. A
major step in this process is disassembling narrative itself, disassem¬
bling, that is, the formal equivalent of generative fatherhood. This,
in turn, means undoing the illusion of sequential time. I have fo¬
cused on how Beckett carries on the formal efforts of Augustine and
Wordsworth to, as it were, pull time up into the text. I have done so
by concentrating on that special feature, the spot of time. In this
regard, it is significant that the penultimate sportn Company is a
meditation on a watch—literally a spot of time—defamiliarized to
the monotonous circular ballet of the second hand and its shadow
(C, 57-59).
This perspective on Beckett’s art might well, among other things,
displace the common oedipal narrative of Beckett’s relations with
Joyce—that is, the tale of the supremely competent father and his
defiantly incompetent son. It would revalue the impact on Beckett
of Finnegans Wake,, a work that in its own way sought to pull time
up into itself. Though I would not argue that Finnegans Wake is the

27Bair, Samuel Beckett, xii. Company was begun in 1977 as Bair’s biography was being
readied for publication. For a different perspective on Company as a reply or reaction to
Bair’s biography, see Ann Beer, “No-Man’s Land: Beckett’s Bilingualism as Autobiogra¬
phy,” in Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian History and Litera¬
ture, ed. James Noonan (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), 170-171.
 20 Beckett Writing Beckett

kind of conscious autography which I am arguing Beckett’s work is,

the two artists’ mutual experience of the continuing incompletion
of Joyce’s second epic over roughly a decade was perhaps the out¬
standing artistic fact of their relationship. In other words, the tale of
the supreme artist (creator of finished masterpieces) and his rebel¬
lious ephebe (arch botcher) is replaced by a long tableau of shared
(company in the shadow of 4 project outside the closure of time and
fictional form. And though Joyce finally did (as Beckett would with
his own work) see the text bound and published, he wrote it in such
a way that readers would continue experiencing forever what he had
experienced for the last fourteen years of his life. He had succeeded
in creating an art without end. Work forever in progress, it was work
that, to use Beckett’s continual refrain, “must go on.”
If this proposal regarding Beckett’s relationship with Joyce is
more speculative than real, the necessarily in-progress character of
Beckett’s art is an unavoidable consequence of my argument. For to
end would be either to give way to the illusion of auto-biography or
to switch over altogether to fiction. For all his great gift for artistic
form, Beckett continually avoided formal completion. And though,
like Joyce, he saw his works bound and published, these “finished”
works contain everywhere notes and questions for the author.28
Moreover, as I argue in the next chapter, by repeating names, im¬
ages, and motifs from one work to another—sufficiently developed
to be recognizable, insufficiently developed to connect—Beckett was
constantly reinventing his entire oeuvre. Company, in particular, as
both John Pilling and Enoch Brater have shown with impressive
documentation, is a kind of Beckett “compendium” or “palimp¬
sest.”29 There is the constant sense of a continuation, together with

28<<Impending for some time the following. Need for company not continuous. Mo¬
ments when his own unrelieved a relief. Intrusion of voice at such. Similarly image of
hearer. Similarly his own. Regret then at having brought them about and problem how
dispel them. Finally what meant by his own unrelieved? What possible relief? Leave it at
that for the moment” (C, 31).

29Pilling, “‘Company,’” 127-131; Enoch Brater, “The Company Beckett Keeps: The
Shape of Memory and One Fabulist’s Decay of Lying,” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic
Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 157-
171.
 Narratricide 21

the absence of any clear repetition. Additions to the oeuvre are as

unexpected and disorienting as they are, in retrospect, somehow fit¬
ting. What appears an extravagant concern for originality is a key
part of the effort to avoid the development of tropes from within,
tropes however peculiar to his own work which would still occlude
the possibility of, to ill-express it, the closest possible encounter.
For one function of strangeness in Beckett’s work is to keep readers
(including, while he was alive, Beckett himself) in quest of its de¬
viser.
This last consideration brings us to Beckett’s special earnestness,
his intensity and focus. Few writers have approached his austerity of
purpose. If I am right, what is involved here is more than his being
peculiar or compulsive or even what is called a “dedicated artist.”
To say of Beckett that his art was his life is to give new meaning to
an old cliche. It is to explain why, outside of his art, as in it, he was so
hesitant to talk of his life. For to engage in autobiography, however
casually, would have been to threaten that ongoing enterprise which
was the very closest approach to what autobiography presumes. As
Opener says in Cascando, a radio play written late in 1961, it was
what he lived on:

They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. They don’t see
me, they don’t see what my life is, they don’t see what I live on, and
they say, That is not his life, he does not live on that.
[Pause.]
I have lived on it. . . till I’m old. (CSPL, 140)

In consequence, what autography also means in Beckett’s case is

an art of extreme vulnerability. Instead of an artist above his work,
paring his fingernails, we have an artist seeking to approach unmedi-)
ated contact. As one of his voices says, he is “devising it Mhfor
company” (C, 8 et passim). The phrase can be taken in several ways.
Beckett told John Calder in 1976 that “in old age work would be his
‘company.’ ”30 And the last words of Company are “And you as you
always were. Alone.” It is important never to underrate the feeling

30Beer, “Beckett’s ‘Autography,’ ” 771.

22 Beckett Writing Beckett

of utter isolation which runs through Beckett’s work. But one of the
ways to read “devising it all for company” is in the spirit in which
Wordsworth addressed his poem to Coleridge and Augustine ad¬
dressed his work to God. These autographical texts, by creating the
possibility of contact, create the possibility of company.

I will come back to the meaning of “company” in Beckett’s work

in my last two chapters. The object of this book is to show how
Beckett’s art can be read as a continuous autographical project. Cen¬
tral to this argument is the way in which so much of Beckett’s artistic
effect is a production of strangeness. This same quality in Beckett is
highly susceptible to methods of reading, like those of the Russian
formalists, which are predicated on a concept of aesthetic defamili¬
arization (ostranenie). This formalist strain, as is well known, con¬
tributed much to the New Criticism, a way of reading which starts
with the abolition of autobiography and which has, in its turn, in¬
spired so much of the American response to Beckett, including my
own earlier work. Gontarski’s argument in The Intent of Undoing—
that Beckett undoes autobiography, converting its raw material to
art—can be seen as a shoring up of this American formalist critique
of Beckett. If my present reading of Beckett represents a sharp diver¬
gence from this critique, it also has points of compatibility with it,
including shared roots in a formalist aesthetic of defamiliarization.
Finally, as I have suggested in this chapter, once the stakes of his
project became clear, it was clear also that the achievement of a
successful autography required of Beckett what I have been calling
“narratricide.” Two major steps toward this end occurred at approx¬
imately the same time in his career (1948-50): the writing of a play
in which “nothing happened” (Godot) and the exhaustion of the
quest narrative in The Unnamable. In the fourth and fifth chapters,
I take up Beckett’s first fully postnarrative art. The immediate busi¬
ness of the next two chapters is to take a closer look at Beckett’s way
of making strange, to place it in combination with the earnestness
referred to above, and to weigh how well or ill these two qualities fit
with the construction of a postmodern Beckett. The goal is to ac¬
quire not a label for Beckett but a keener sense of the difference of
his art.
 Two

Beckett and
Postmodernism

Then on! then on! Where duty leads,

My course be onward still.
—Bishop Reginald Heber

From early in the 1960s, Beckett has been a site of the modernist/
postmodernist turf war. Unlike Virginia Woolf (modernist) or John
Cage (postmodernist), Beckett has remained a categorical riff, giving
the lie to categories.1 Nonetheless, after a spate of early readings
(often inflected by Beckett’s connection with Joyce and Proust) cast¬
ing him as a modernist or late modernist or, at times, the “Last

To the student of categorical consciousness, Beckett reveals the semantic porousness

of categories. Even those who might agree on a category for him more often than not
disagree on why he fits. Both Hugh Kenner and Irving Howe have called Beckett the “Last
Modernist,” but they assign him the label for strikingly different reasons. Again for differ¬
ent reasons, David Lodge called Beckett “the first important postmodernist writer,” and
Ihab Hassan suggested the publication date of Murphy (1938) as a beginning date for
postmodernism, while Marjorie Perloff located Beckett in a still-lengthening strain of
modernism which began with Rimbaud. See Hugh Kenner, “Modernism and What Hap¬
pened to It,” Essays in Criticism 37 (April 1987): 97; Irving Howe, The Decline of the New
(New York: Harcourt, 1970), 33; David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor,
Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 12; Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1975), 44; Marjorie Perloff, “ ‘The Space of a Door’: Beckett and the
Poetry of Absence,” in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1983), 200-247.

23
24 Beckett Writing Beckett

Modernist,” momentum has passed to the other side as the post¬

modernist categorizers have steadily gained the high ground. Their
advantage of armament has come from the fit between Beckett’s
writing and poststructuralist theory, a fit so snug that Beckett has
provided, to use Herbert Blau’s word, a “gloss” on deconstruction.2
Michel Foucault appropriated voices from The Unnamable and Texts
for Nothing to abet his attack on essentialistic constructions of au¬
thorship.3 And for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Beckett has
exemplified such concepts as “schizophrenic disjunction,” “schizoid
sequences,” and “territorial assemblages.”4
Since 1980, a steady production of essays has argued that Beck¬
ett’s art is, in the words of Stephen Barker, “writing of and for de-
construction.”5 There have also been book-length studies, beginning
with Angela Moorjani’s Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beck¬
ett in 1982 and steadily increasing into the nineties with books by
Richard Begam, Steven Connor, Peter Gidal, Sylvie Debevec Hen¬
ning, Leslie Hill, Carla Locatelli, Thomas Tresize, and David Watson
that have elaborated a postromantic, posthumanist, post-Heidegger-
ian Beckett. Connor’s book Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and
Text had a special impact when it appeared in 1988 because it not
only made the case for Beckett as postmodern “bricoleur” but situ-

2Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern, Theories of Contempo¬
rary Culture 9 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 65-103.

3Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Se¬

lected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 138, and “The Discourse on Language,” in The
Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1972), 215.

“Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 76, 324; A Thou¬
sand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univer¬
sity of Minnesota Press, 1987), 503. More recently, Deleuze has contributed a long essay,
“L’epuise,” on Beckett’s late work for television; Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pieces
pour la television (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 55-106.

5Stephen Barker, “Conspicuous Absence: Trace and Power in Beckett’s Drama,” in

Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lance St. John Butler and Robin J.
Davis (London: Macmillan, 1990), 201.
 Beckett and Postmodernism 25

ated his work in opposition to the essentializing activities of the

Beckett critical establishment. And now Jacques Derrida himself, in
an interview published in 1992, has described Beckett as “an author
to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself
very close; but also too close”—so close, in fact, that he has avoided
dealing analytically with Beckett, having felt “as though I had always
already read him and understood him too well.”6
But Beckett remains a categorical rift. The deconstructive Beckett
is a modernist Beckett or, rather, what John Fletcher almost called
him, a “postmodern modernist.”7 His deconstructive art not only
grew out of, but sustained, salient elements of a modernist frame of
mind, of which perhaps the most consistent is reflected in the fact
that, where the postmodern terms of choice are “difference” and

6Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” in Acts of Literature, ed.
Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60-61. The books referred to are Angela
Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, North Carolina Studies in the
Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 219 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1982); Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995); Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Ox¬
ford: Blackwell, 1988); Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and
Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Macmillan, 1986); Sylvie Debevec Hen- •
ning, Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition (Lexington: Uni¬
versity Press of Kentucky, 1988); Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel
Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990); Thomas Tresize, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Though there is some debate as to whether
Lacan is properly described as poststructuralist, I have included David Watson’s excellent
Lacanian study, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1991), which, as I read it, falls on the poststructuralist side of the ledger.

7Fletcher’s exact words are: “Like Matisse in the 1950s, Beckett stands dominant today
as one of Modernism’s great survivors, postmodernly modern to the last.” John Fletcher,
“Modernism and Samuel Beckett,” in Facets of European Modernism, ed. Janet Garton
(Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1985), 216. In a spirited rejection of the whole
modernist/postmodernist dispute, P. J. Murphy makes the case for a “post-avant-gar-
diste” Beckett. This is a Beckett who, in his engagement with traditional issues of the
relations of art and life, escapes the predictable bromides and sterile formalism to which,
in Murphy’s view, participants on either side of the debate would consign him (Murphy,
Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction [Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1990]).
26 Beckett Writing Beckett

“deconstruction” the modernist terms were “opposition” and “re¬

sistance.” Even before the terms of postmodernism (including the
term “postmodernism” itself) had gained currency, something very
similar to the contrast between difference and opposition was in¬
voked by Irving Howe in an already nostalgic essay, published just
prior to the American efflorescence of poststructuralist theory and
titled “The Culture of Modernism.” Howe singled out Beckett as
the last modernist, underscoring Beckett’s fidelity to the modernist
spirit of opposition and his consistent refusal to decline into one or
another mode of intellectual or aesthetic fixity (primitivism, nihil¬
ism, political ideology) or, worse still, to sell out to a commercial
culture in which “the decor of yesterday is appropriated and slicked
up; the noise of revolt, magnified in a frolic of emptiness; and what
little remains of modernism, denied so much as the dignity of oppo¬
sition.”8
In so defining modernism, Howe sought to identify as its consis¬
tent deep structure what was most dramatically expressed in the
concept of an avant-garde: exceptional fidelity to the spirit of oppo¬
sition. As such, modernist art carried the spirit of opposition every¬
where into the form as well as the content of art. At the same time,
it fell short of an all-embracing irony; it preserved, in Howe’s terms,
the focused intent of earnest opposition.9 Decades later, Fredric
Jameson used the same idea to distinguish the modernist from the
postmodernist. In Jameson’s version of postmodern art and culture,
the modernist device of parody gives way to pastiche, a value-neutral
mashing together of styles, “without any of parody’s ulterior mo¬
tives, amputated of the satirical impulse, devoid of laughter and of
any conviction that, alongside the abnormal tongue you have mo-

8“A lonely gifted survivor, Beckett remains to remind us of the glories modernism once
brought” (Howe, The Decline of the New, 33).

9Alan Wilde, for example, uses the term “absolute irony” to group Beckett and others
who have advanced to “the furthest perceptual thrust of the modernist movement”
(Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination [Balti¬
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981], 40).
 Beckett and Postmodernism 27

mentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.

Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.”10
The importance of maintaining this distinction in the case of
Samuel Beckett is not to make another contribution to the war of
labels. Rather, by identifying the limits of a postmodernist reading
of Beckett, we can gain a purchase on several key aspects of his
autographical investment in his work and see how this investment
colored his approach to the artistic business of making strange.

An Art of the Oeuvre

The great challenge faced by an art founded on the principle of

opposition is finding ways to resist the neutralizing effect of repeti¬
tion, whether repetition is imposed from without or arises from
within. From without, repetition is inflicted through the various cul¬
tural agencies of appropriation, duplication, and veneration. Lionel
Trilling noted in 1961, in his anxious reflections on the teaching of
modern literature, that the familiarity bred and enforced by canon¬
ization robs the modernist “classic” of the very element that origi¬
nally gave it life.11 But the normality enforced by cultural repetitions
parallels what modernists themselves often sensed as a threat from
within: the danger of self-repetition. In Howe’s words, “Modernism

10Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 17. Though Jameson has, in this book, softened his
critique of postmodernism, the passage cited traveled pretty much unchanged from an
earlier essay. Andreas Huyssen has mounted a counterargument by identifying true post¬
modernism with the spirit of the avant garde and its revival in the sixties; see Andreas
Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986). For a broader defense of the political viability of post¬
modernism see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1988).

’'Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture (New
York: Viking, 1965), 3-30.
28 Beckett Writing Beckett

does not establish a prevalent style of its own; or if it does, it denies

itself, thereby ceasing to be modern.”12
It is here that the anxiety of modernism closely matches the post¬
structuralist absorption with the problematic relations of repetition
and difference. The dilemma of naming articulated by Howe and
Trilling is the same dilemma that led Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard to his
elegant inversion of terms whereby modernism would denote nam-
able—that is, repeatable—styles (for example, cubism) and post¬
modernism their unnamable, as yet to be repeated, precondition
(Picasso and Braque, reacting to the now recognizable, and hence
modernist, style of Cezanne, but not yet arrived at cubism).13 But
despite Lyotard’s privileging of the term “postmodern” (arguably a
move that, by the very act of making it, defeated its purpose), mod¬
ernists themselves frequently sought to practice an oppositional art
so thoroughgoing as to elude the classifiable. This quality lies as
much behind Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of the constancy of willed
self-transformation or behind the mutability of Proust’s characters
as it does behind the succession of new formal departures that char¬
acterize such modernist oeuvres as those of Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Thomas Mann.
This importation of the principle of resistance into one’s own
evolving oeuvre was brought to what may well be (and remain) its
historical apex by Beckett. It is implicit in the constant formal exper¬
imentation that marks his work from the start, a restlessness that
would indicate, among other things, a continual search for new ways
to begin. It shows up also in Beckett’s deployment, almost every¬
where in his work, of a process of self-resistance we can call recollec¬
tion by invention. This is a technique of deliberate metamorphosis,
a kind of remembering by misremembering in successive works of

_ n
A
12Howe, The Decline of the New, 3.

13“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus
understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state.” “Answering the Ques¬
tion: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Regis Durand in Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, The Post¬
modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Minne¬
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79.
 Beckett and Postmodernism 29

elements from those that went before. It is the quiet, baffled epony¬
mous hero of Watt (composed 1943-45), making his thundering
entrance in Beckett’s next novel, Mercier and Camier, or Malone,
revived after his death at the end of Malone Dies to move in orbit in
the discourse of The Unnamable, or the “great wild black and white
eye, moist... to weep with” in The Unnamable (TN, 359) recovered
in the “great moist cleg-tormented eyes” of Christy’s hinny in All
That Fall (CSPL, 13). The device riddles the oeuvre, and can be
found not simply in people and body parts but themes, words, turns
of phrase, structural devices.14
A concentrated refinement of modernist practice, the device not
only has the look of the postmodern but, up to a certain point, a
textbook availability to poststructural analysis. What I am calling
recollection by invention is similar to what Steven Connor in his
study of Beckett called, drawing on the terminology of Gilles De-
leuze, “clothed” (as opposed to “naked”) repetition. Naked repeti¬
tion is so blatant a repetition it gives the illusion of some essential
reality. It is what Molloy called “the principle of advertising”—“If I
go on long enough calling that my life I’ll end up by believing it. It’s
the principle of advertising” (TN, 53). By contrast, clothed repeti¬
tion puts diffe?ence on display; it is repetition that signals the impos¬
sibility of repetition. Even as it indicates what is repeated, it ensures
its absolute indeterminacy.15 I shall return to Connor’s important

14Harold Bloom’s appropriation of Soren Kierkegaard’s phrase “recollecting forward”

bears affinities with what I am calling “recollection by invention.” But I hesitate to invoke
Bloom’s theories of poetic succession because they are so bound up with the idea of an
agon. As I argued in the last chapter, however adequate such theories may be to the early
Beckett, he was by mid-career working his way outside of the oedipal sequence. Recollec¬
tion by invention plays a central role in that nonprogressive orientation to his art. See
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 82.

15Connor, Samuel Beckett, 5-9 et passim. For “clothed,” Deleuze uses, alternatively,
“vetu,” “Masque,” “deguise,” and “travesti.” Considering the concept involved, this se¬
ries could go on forever. For the opposed concept, fittingly, only one term is used: “nu”;
see Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968),
36-39. The wording in my text slightly adapts both Connor and Deleuze for my own
stress in the analysis that follows. For further treatment of repetition in Beckett, see
Moorjani’s Abysmal Games and Locatelli’s Unwording the World.
30 Beckett Writing Beckett

study later, but first I want to address this process of recollection by

invention which was, I think, Beckett’s most significant refinement
of modernist oppositional practice. It allowed him to create and
maintain a web of resistances out of which his art gained much of
its life. The Beckett oeuvre operates as a language, but one that seeks
never to allow us to forget that meaning is a matter of difference
and deferral. Beckett always situated his art against our expectations,
but it is in the preemptive vigilance he exercised on his own work
that he raised to a new level the oppositional character of classical
modernism.16
In Happy Days, well on in Act I, Winnie, finding herself incapable
of putting her parasol down, says, “No, something must happen, in
the world, take place, some change, I cannot, if I am to move again”
(HD, 36); shortly thereafter her parasol bursts into flame. Again, late
in Act II, Winnie says, “No, something must move, in the world, I
can’t any more” (HD, 60); shortly thereafter Willie, for the first time
in the play, comes from behind the mound and out into full view.
Both events are rich parodies, drawing oppositional life from a vari¬
ety of conventions: the answered prayer, the deus ex machina, the
catastrophe (flames, possible death-dealing by Willie), and most
broadly the dramatic mythos itself (Aristotelian action). But they
also take place in an aesthetic field that had been recently fashioned
by Beckett’s own work for the theater, most notably by Waiting for
Godot. By the fall of 1961, when Happy Days was first performed,
Godot was in serious danger of becoming a classic, having advanced
to that status through what could be called the law of retrospective

l6Recollection by invention closely resembles common accounts of the working of in-

tertextuality. The best definition of the latter, in my view, is provided by Gerald L. Bruns:
“To write is to intervene in what has already been written; it is to work ‘between the lines’
of antecedent texts, there to gloss, to embellish, to build upon invention. All writing is
essentially amplification of discourse; it consists in doing something to (or with) other
texts” (Bruns, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982], 52-53). As Bruns acknowledges, there are degrees of
intertextual subtlety. Beckett is nothing if not extraordinarily adept in his interventions
in antecedent texts. But the further distinction we are working with here is the conscious
application of this procedure to one’s own work.
 Beckett and Postmodernism 31

comparative advantage.17 Beckett had become “the author of

Godot,” the man who wrote the play in which “nothing happens,
twice.”18 Happy Days, then, creates its effects not simply against
Greek tragedy and Protestant devotional practice or (to go on)
against Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, Paradise Lost, Gray’s
“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” and The Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam—to name a few of the classics against which the
play also situates itself (one never “loses one’s classics”)—but also
against the emerging classic Waiting for Godot.
In such a context, Happy Days is the play in which something
happens, twice. Like other surprising features of the play (Winnie’s
femininity, her relentless cheerfulness), the structure of the play it¬
self draws energy from Godot’s countervailing field of influence. The
absolute absence of the long-awaited one in Godot is undercut in the
later play first by an unaccountable flame (bringing incidentally to
mind storied flames in which the deity appears or from which it
speaks) and second by the vivid manifestation of Willie, “dressed to
kill.” By means of these inventions the earlier play is recollected in
the later. The effect is not to subvert (Godot is neither overthrown
nor corrupted), much less to revert (the deity is not recovered), but
rather to sustain in the later play the effects (among them, the condi¬
tion of unknowing) which are so powerfully evoked in the earlier
one. One has only to imagine a Happy Days in which Willie never
appears and is never seen by Winnie to appreciate at once how
boldly opportunistic Beckett’s oppositional art is (the fine embellish¬
ments of Willie’s hairy arm, his newspaper, the words he says, Win¬
nie’s ability to rap him on the skull) and how oppressive Godot
might have become in the oeuvre of a lesser artist.
Beckett’s art, then, fuels itself. And the brilliance with which it

17“They begin ... by saluting play A as ‘awful.’ When play B comes along, that too is
awful, not nearly as good as A. Play C is then dismissed as awful, worse than B, which
though good was not a patch on A, which in the interval has become a masterpiece.”
Opinion of Alan Schneider as rendered by Beryl S. and John Fletcher in their A Student's
Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1985), 89.

18Perhaps the most widely cited description of Godot, this was first employed by Vivian
Mercier in “The Uneventful Event,” Irish Times, February 18, 1956: 6.
32 Beckett Writing Beckett

burns is directly proportional to the threat of familiarity from which

it seeks to escape. Familiarity and habit were defined as threats to
art in Beckett’s earliest published critical writing: the essay “Dante
... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” (1929) and the monograph Proust (1931),
both written when he was in his twenties. At the time, he was ad¬
vancing an aesthetic argument implicit in the art of the two modern¬
ist masters (Joyce and Proust) who had had the greatest influence
on him and who, in their turn, were recapitulating an antagonism
to habit one can find as far back as Baudelaire’s concept of modern-
ite. As Beckett pursued his own craft over the succeeding decades,
he turned this modernist screw ever tighter, bearing down with in¬
creasingly keen attention on the emergent familiarity of his own
work and on the opportunities it afforded for occasions of renewed
surprise. In this context, the device of recollection by invention—
calling attention to what you thought you remembered as Beckett,
but bringing it to mind as different—played a critical role. In conse¬
quence, the gathering intertextual complexity of Beckett’s oeuvre is
marked by a double action: Happy Days takes its life in opposition
to Godot and in so doing gives new life to the earlier play. For this
reason I prefer to the term “repetition” the Augustinian term “recol¬
lection” (or “re-collection”) with its connotation of the recursive
action that Augustine wondered at in the working of memory and
that he found expressed in the Latin word cogitare.19 By his inven¬
tions, both grand and subtle, Beckett augmented the double action
of recollection. In this way, he was always writing everything he had
written.

The Trope of Onwardness

Such an approach to one’s art, with its continual recursive motion,
puts into question the idea of the progress or development of an
oeuvre. By the time he had begun his theatrical work in earnest,

19St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961),

218-219.
 Beckett and Postmodernism 33

Beckett had become fully absorbed by this question. His early writ¬ (jKrt&tl
ing shows signs that he had already begun imagining his work as a
total oeuvre, but it was in the forties that his collected achievement
Began to take on its unusual combination of coherence and unravel-
ment. In the same decade, Beckett began to introduce into his work
with increasing frequency the Victorian trope of onwardness. This
trope is worth dwelling on not only because it foregrounds the ques¬
tion of whether oeuvres progress but because the trope itself, in
Beckett’s hands, is yet another element that participates in the com¬
plex web of resistances which Beckett created through the method
of recollection by invention. The textual history of the trope is
closely bound up with that of the dead metaphor of progress. Its
prehistory seems to lie mainly in the language of combat, a usage
that is itself revived, often with symbolic suggestiveness, in nine¬
teenth-century literature of the battlefield (“En avant, Gaulois et
Francs!”; “Forward, the Light Brigade!”). In the nineteenth century,
it can be found spread out over a great range of discourse—poetry,
devotional literature, political oratory, social commentary, the novel.
In its characteristic manifestation, the trope was distinguished by
three features: (1) the exhortative mood, bearing with it the sense
of obligation, duty, and moral imperative (“Onward!”); (2) linear
directionality, or the sense of a progressive, usually ascending, ad¬
vance toward an objective that lies ahead, both in space and time;
and (3) processionality, or an orientation toward the ennobling and
arduous process of advance rather than the final objective, which,
like the end of a story, is less interesting in itself than in what it
enables. It was the sufficiency of the process of onwardness which
made, in an age that glorified the exploratory voyager, Robert Scott’s
doomed 1912 expedition to the South Pole a kind of apotheosis of
the trope.
All the major Victorian poets yield examples of the trope of on¬
wardness:

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
34 Beckett Writing Beckett

Find us further than to-day.

Roam on! the light we sought is shining still
Call me rather, silent voices,
Forward to the starry track
Glimmering up the heights beyond me
On, and always on! \
On and on, anyhow onward . . .20

In cadence and diction, this poetic language matches very closely

that of nineteenth-century Christian hymnology (“Onward, Chris¬
tian soldiers”) as well as the political and social rhetoric of a society
that conceived of itself as engaged in righteous movement and in
which one’s individual being found its validation in the degree to
which one shared or imitated that movement:

A sacred burthen is this life ye bear,

Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly;
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.21

Modernist parody made considerable capital out of the trope of

onwardness, and in so doing thematized modernism’s rejection of
both linearity and the Victorian moral imperative. A brilliant sub¬
version of the trope occurs in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in her repre¬
sentation of Mr. Ramsay’s intellectual expedition to the end of the
alphabet (“On, then, on to R”).22 The chapters of Joyce’s Portrait of

^Respectively, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” Arnold’s “Thyr-

sis,” Tennyson’s “Silent Voices,” Browning’s “Martin Relph.”

21Frances Anne Butler [Fanny Kemble], “Lines Addressed to the Young Gentlemen
Leaving the Academy at Lennox, Massachusetts,” in Poems (London: Henry Washbourne,
1844), 126.

22Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 55. In a series of deft
strokes, Woolf plays Mr. Ramsay’s expedition off against Scott’s: “Who shall blame him,
if, standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised
by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed
expedition, if, having ventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last
ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some
 Beckett and Postmodernism 35

the Artist as a Young Man present Stephen’s immersion in successive

transformations of the figure: “A wild angel had appeared to him,
the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts
of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of
all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”23 The
long last chapter of A Portrait can be read as one final, difficult
gestation of the figure, which at the very end makes its appearance
in a dingy, battered improvisation: “Away! Away! . . . Welcome, O
life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience
and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of
my race.”24 Coming now from Stephen’s pen, the trope may well
announce in its parodic style the birth of Stephen’s own modernist
awareness.
Beckett’s adaptation of the trope began implicitly in Watt, the
novel he wrote during World War II, with the imperative yet ob¬
scurely destined journeying of its protagonist; was sustained in the
same way in Mercier and Camier, the Nouvelles, and Molloy; and
finally given explicit development toward the end of Malone Dies.
The striking variation on the trope that Beckett introduced through
Malone is its reflexive application to the writing of which it is a
part. Nor is it just any writing, but a life’s work, an oeuvre. Malone,
struggling to bring on the catastrophe of his story before expiring
Tiimself, exhorts his pen to greater effort: “On. One morning
Lemuel, . . .” and later, “But what matter about Lady Pedal? On”
(TN, 280, 281). Here, among the last fragments of consecutive nar¬
rative in his work, Beckett introduces the trope almost as if to signal
his own emergent sense of an oeuvre. From then on, Beckett so
frequently restated the trope that it became one of the commonest
Beckettian markers. In the very next book of the trilogy, The Un-
namable, the trope was transferred from the task of narration to that
of self-formulation:

pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires
sympathy, and whisky, and someone to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who
shall blame him?” (57).

23James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1968), 172.

24Ibid., 252-253.
36 Beckett Writing Beckett

strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already,
perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to
the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story,
that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence,
where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t
know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (TN, 414)

In the late text Worstward Ho (1983), Beckett built a forty-page tone

poem out of the trope, beginning with a fanfare so brazen as to
suggest not a little self-conscious irony: “On. Say on. Be said on.
Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” (WH, 7).25 The title
of this piece, at first blush a bad joke, sustains the figure’s Victorian
embeddedness, evoking both the Westward course of Empire and,
more specifically, Charles Kingsley’s classic tale of adventure and
combat on the Spanish Main.26 This example and others throughout
Beckett also recover the Victorian counterversion of the trope of
onwardness: the urge for stasis, for abandoning the march, feeling
the imperative as a whip. Among Victorians, the counterversion was
given early expression in such poems as Tennyson’s “The Lotos-
Eaters” (“Time driveth onward fast/And in a little while our lips are
numb. / Leave us alone”) and was later elaborated by Ernest Dow-
son, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Butler Yeats. In
1951, Beckett translated a distilled example of the counterversion by
the short-lived, late-nineteenth-century Mexican poet maudit Man¬
uel Gutierrez Najera in his poem “To Be”:
There is no pause.
We crave a single instant of respite
and a voice in the darkness urges: “On!”27

25Ruby Cohn has touched on the resonance of Beckett’s use of “on” in Worstward Ho:
“. . . ‘no’ reverses to a polyvalent ‘on.’ And that monosyllable—on—may serve as the
watchword of Beckett’s ever searching, ever exploring ‘wordward ho.’ ”A Casebook on
“Waiting for Godot,” ed. Cohn (London: Macmillan, 1987), 13.

26For a fuller exposition of the complex directionality of Beckett’s title, see Enoch
Brater, “Voyelles, Cromlechs, and the Special (W)rites of Worstward Ho,” in Beckett’s
Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur
(London: Macmillan, 1987), 167-168.

17Mexican Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Octavio Paz, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York:
Grove, 1985), 136.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
“THESSALUS.”
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 “THESSALUS.”
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Here are a few of her best:—

AUSTRALIAN PASSAGES.

1878 Start to Melbourne 67 days.

1882 London to Sydney 79 „
1884 Downs to Sydney 77 „
1887 London to Sydney 79 „
1893 Cardiff to Sydney (via Capetown) 78 „
1894 London to Sydney (via Capetown) 78 „
1896 Sydney to London 75 „

CALCUTTA PASSAGES.
 1876 Calcutta to London 90 days.
1878 Calcutta to Dundee 98 „
1879 Penarth Roads to Calcutta 98 „

FRISCO AND W.C.N.A. PASSAGES.

1883 Frisco to Lizard 105 days.
1885 Frisco to Hull 125 „
1888 Portland, Ore., to Queenstown 98 „
1889 Frisco to Queenstown 104 „
1890 Swansea to Frisco 113 „
1890 Frisco to Lizard 109 „
1892 Frisco to Queenstown 101 „

CROSS PASSAGES.
1878 Melbourne to Calcutta 48 days.
1880 Calcutta to Melbourne 49 „
1882 Sydney to Frisco 55 „
1884 Sydney to San Pedro 66 „
1884 Frisco to Newcastle, N.S.W. 45 „
1886 Newcastle, N.S.W., to Frisco 50 „

On her third voyage she encountered the cyclone of 31st October,

1876, near the Sandheads. Captain E. C. Bennett, foreseeing the
approach of the cyclone, stood over to the east side of the Bay of
Bengal, and considered himself lucky to escape with the loss of his
topgallant masts.
Lashed on top of his main hatch, he had a large kennel containing a
pack of foxhounds for the Calcutta Jackal Club. When the cyclone began,
the hounds were let out of the kennel, to give them a chance to save
themselves; and shortly afterwards the kennel was washed clean over
the lee rail without touching it. The hounds had meanwhile disappeared
and everyone thought that they must have gone overboard; but when
the weather cleared they all came out, safe and sound, from under the
lower foc’s’le bunks, where they had taken refuge.
This cyclone wrought havoc amongst the Calcutta shipping, and cost
the underwriters over £100,000. Thessalus was lucky to get off with a
repair bill of £380.
 The Thessalus was lucky with live freight. On her seventh voyage she
took horses from Melbourne to Calcutta and landed them all alive and in
prime condition. Shortly afterwards the Udston arrived with only four
horses alive. She had had bad weather in the Bay of Bengal, the horses
had broken loose and in their fright kicked each other to death. On this
voyage, Thessalus returned to Melbourne with wheat bags, wool packs
and camels. The camels also arrived in good condition. At Melbourne
she loaded wool for London at a penny per pound.
Her best wool passage was in 1896, when she left Sydney on the 17th
October and was only 75 days to the Start, where she signalled on 31st
December. She had left Melbourne in company with Cimba and
Argonaut. Argonaut made a long passage, but Thessalus and Cimba
were twice in company, concerning which Captain Holmes of Cimba
wrote:—
I left Sydney in company with Thessalus and Argonaut. I was twice in company with
Thessalus on 3rd October in 54° S., 152° W., to 5th October 54° S., 143° W., and on
25th November in 30° S., 34° W. I came up on him in light winds, but when he got the
breeze he just romped away from me as if I was at anchor. Thessalus was a
wonderfully fast ship. I think the German five-master Potosi is the only one I have seen
to touch her.

This is high praise, for Captain Holmes had a great knowledge of

ships, especially in the Australian trade, and he had a very fast ship in
Cimba, which on this occasion reported at noon at the Lizard when
Thessalus was reporting at Start Point.
After a long and successful career Thessalus was sold to the Swedes
in 1905, when she was still classed 100 A1.

tes on Passages to Australia in 1874.

1874 was Ben Voirlich’s great year. It will be noticed, however,
that on her record passage she had Lochs Ness and Maree on her heels
the whole way. Both Lochs had just changed their commanders, Captain
Meiklejohn going to the Loch Ness and Captain Charles Grey succeeding
Captain McCallum in Loch Maree. Loch Ness chased Ben Voirlich very
closely all the way to the Australian Coast, her best 24-hour run being
321 miles. But Loch Maree dropped back in the roaring forties through
no fault of her own. On 13th and 14th December she experienced a
tremendous gale from east working round to S.W. with high confused
sea, during which her patent steering gear was completely smashed up;
and this prevented her from taking full advantage of the westerlies, as
Captain Grey decided it would not be safe to go further than 42° S.
PASSAGES UNDER 80 DAYS TO SYDNEY IN 1874.
Crossed Passed Arrived
Crossed Days
Ship Departure Cape S.W. Cape Port
Equator Out
Meridian Tasmania Jackson
Cutty Sark Start Nov. 21 Dec. 11 Jan. 1 ’75 Jan. 26 ’75 Feb. 2 ’75 73
Mermerus Start Apl. 14 May 8 May 29 June 24 June 27 74
Hallowe’en Start April 9 Apl. 30 May 22 June 17 June 22 74
June
Patriarch Wight July 2 July 26 Aug. 19 Aug. 24 77
8
(Otway)
Jerusalem Plymouth Apl. 5 Apl. 29 May 21 June 14 June 22 78
(Otway)

PASSAGES UNDER 80 DAYS TO MELBOURNE IN 1874.

Crossed Passed Arrived
Crossed Days
Ship Departure Cape Cape Hobson’s
Equator Out
Meridian (Otway) Bay
Jan. 14
Thermopylae Lizard Dec. 2 Dec. 25 Feb. 4 ’75 64
’75
Ben Voirlich Plymouth Nov. 11 Dec. 1 Dec. 24 Jan. 14 ’75 64
Jan. 16
Loch Ness Tuskar Nov. 11 Dec. 1 Jan. 18 ’75 68
’75
Jan.
Ben Voirlich Tuskar Feb. 19 Mar. 15 Apl. 5 Apl. 6 69
27
Thomas Jan. 29
Lizard Nov. 22 Dec. 12 Jan. 31 ’75 70
Stephens ’75
Cape
Ben Cruachan Sept. 4 Sept. 29 Oct. 20 Nov. 13 Nov. 14 71
Clear
Romanoff Lizard Nov. 5 Jan. 16 ’75 72
Theophane Tuskar Aug. 16 Sept. 12 Oct. 3 Oct. 30 75
City of Hankow Channel Nov. 19 Feb. 2 ’75 75
Loch Lomond Tuskar Nov. 30 Feb. 14 ’75 75
Dec. Jan. 23
Loch Maree Channel Nov. 6 Dec. 25 Jan. 22 ’75 78
1 ’75

Cutty Sark and Thomas Stephens also had a great race, the famous
tea clipper making the best passage of the year to Sydney.
 Both ships were off the Lizards on 22nd November, and experienced
very baffling winds to the equator, which Cutty Sark crossed in 26° W.
and Thomas Stephens in 29° W. a day later. Cutty Sark was 65 days
from the Lizards to S.W. Cape, Tasmania, whilst Thomas Stephens was
68 days to the Otway, where she was becalmed for 14 hours.
Thermopylae, with a 64-day passage from the Lizards, her best run
being 348 miles, arrived just in time to defend herself, for Captain
McPetrie was declaring to all and sundry that Ben Voirlich had broken
Thermopylae’s record, by making a better run from port to port.

e “Loch Garry.”
Many experts considered the Loch Garry to be the finest sailing
ship in the world at the date of her launch. She certainly was an
example of the well-known Glasgow type at its best.
A new feature was adopted in the placing of her masts. Her mainmast
was stepped right amidships, with the fore and mizen masts at equal
distances from it.
Loch Garry, her sister ship Loch Vennachar, Green’s Carlisle Castle,
Nicol’s Romanoff and the American ship Manuel Laguna were rigged in a
manner peculiar to themselves. They had short topgallant masts with
fidded royal and skysail masts, on which they crossed royals and skysails
above double topgallant yards. When in port their upper topsail and
upper topgallant yards would be half mast-headed, and with the seven
yards on each mast, all squared to perfection, they presented a
magnificent appearance. Loch Garry’s first commander was Captain
Andrew Black, a very fine seaman indeed. He commanded her from
1875 to 1882. He was succeeded by Captain John Erskine, who was
followed by Captain Horne.
With regard to her merits, the veteran Captain Horne, who
commanded her for close on 26 years, wrote to me:—
The Loch Garry is a front rank ship and always will be so. She is a ship that has got
no vices and when properly loaded is as gentle as a lamb. It is quite a pleasure to sail
such a ship, which might be described as a 1500-ton yacht. She is not a ship of
excessive speed, but with a moderately fresh breeze will maintain a speed of 10 or 11
knots without much exertion.
 Loch Garry’s best run under Captain Horne was on 26th December,
1892, when running her easting down in 40° S. With a N.W. wind and
smooth sea she covered 334 miles. It is very possible that she exceeded
this in her early days when she carried a stronger crew. She was also a
good light weather ship. In 1900 she went from the South Tropic to the
North Tropic in 14 days 2 hours.
The following passages of recent date will show that Captain Horne
kept the Loch Garry moving in spite of the lack of a good crew of
sailormen:—
1892 Tuskar to Cape Otway 71 dy.
1894 Downs to Melbourne 77 „
1895 Lizard to Melbourne 77 „
1896 Melbourne to Prawle Pt. 80 „
1900 Melbourne to Prawle Pt. 85 „
1901 Adelaide to C. Otway 48 hr.
1903 Port Philip Heads to Lizard 74 dy.
1904 Melbourne to Dover 77 „
1906 Tuskar to Cape Borda 73 „
1905 Equator to Leeuwin 36 „
(Average 240 knots)

The following account of Captain Horne’s care of his boats and system
for provisioning them should be a lesson for younger masters. It is taken
from the Melbourne Herald:—
A feature of Loch Garry’s equipment, in which Captain Home takes a justifiable pride,
is the system for provisioning the lifeboats, should it ever be necessary to abandon the
vessel. In two minutes the apprentices can place enough provisions in the boats to last
all hands 14 days. The lifeboats are on the after skids and the falls are always kept
rove. In each boat are two 15-gallon breakers, which are kept full of fresh water,
charged about once a month. Then in a strong wooden box, fitted with beckets, is
stowed a good supply of biscuits, in protected tins, whilst in another box a number of
tins of meat are packed together with the necessary opening knife. A third box
contains miscellaneous articles, such as medical comforts, clothing, tobacco, a hatchet,
knives and a compass. The three boxes are always kept handy in the lazarette, the
provisions they contain being changed each voyage, so that the biscuits and meat are
always fresh. One man can easily lift either of the boxes and the equipment is
completed by the lifeboats’ sails and all necessary gear being kept in a canvas bag
close by. The system is simplicity itself, and Captain Horne says that he would like to
see some such plan made compulsory by the B.O.T. in all ships.
 The career of Captain Horne, who was the veteran skipper of the Loch
Line, is worth recording. He was born in 1834, apprenticed to the sea at
15 years of age, and only retired in 1911, after 62 years at sea and 47
years in command without experiencing shipwreck, fire or collision. The
motto of his life, which he always emblazoned on the cabin bulkhead,
was:—“Never underrate the strength of the enemy.” Like many another
old seaman, he was not pleased with the changes brought about by
steam and cut-throat competition.
Just as Captain Horne’s apprenticeship finished the Crimean war broke
out, and, volunteering for active service, he was appointed to the three-
decker H.M.S. Royal Albert, the largest ship afloat. He was rated as A.B.,
but soon promoted to be second captain of the maintop. Sir George
Tryon was a junior lieutenant on this ship. The Royal Albert was in the
engagement against the Kinburn Forts on the north shore of the Black
Sea. At the close of the war Captain Horne received the Crimean and
Turkish medals and was paid off on the Victory. He then returned to the
Merchant Service and served in 1859 as second mate of the tea clipper
Falcon under Captain Maxton. Subsequently he was attached to Lord
Elgin’s embassy and placed in charge of a lorcha by Lindsay & Co., of
Shanghai. As a member of Lord Elgin’s staff, he was present at the
taking of the Taku Forts and was on the house-boat which was towed to
Tientsin by one of the gunboats; and he remained there until the treaty
was signed.
After this he was 13½ years in the employ of John Allan & Sons. In
1877 he joined the Loch Line and took command of the Loch Sloy,
leaving her to take charge of the Loch Garry in 1885.
The Loch Garry only had two severe mishaps in her long life. In
August, 1880, when running under topgallant sails off the Crozets in a
heavy beam sea, the weather forebrace carried away, the fore topmast
went above the eyes of the rigging and took main topgallant mast with
it—and Loch Garry was a month getting to Melbourne under jury rig.
She was rigged in Geelong with Kauri pine topmasts and long topgallant
masts, as shewn in the illustration. In August, 1889, she was dismasted
in a furious gale to the south’ard of the Cape. To save the ship Captain
Horne was obliged to jettison some 100 tons of cargo in the shape of
gunpowder, hardware, whisky, bottled beer, paper, etc. The main and
mizen masts carried away close to the deck, but Captain Horne
succeeded in sailing his vessel 2600 miles to Mauritius, under foresail
and fore lower topsail. Here the Loch Garry was delayed some months
whilst new spars were sent out from England, and she eventually
reached Melbourne on 14th February, 1890, eight months out from
Glasgow. After 36 years of good service, she was sold in March, 1911, to
the Italians for the scrap iron price of £1800.

ch Vennachar.”
One of the finest and fastest of the Lochs, as well as one of the
most unfortunate, was the Loch Vennachar, launched from Thomson’s
yard in August, 1875.
She was usually one of the first wool clippers to get away from
Melbourne, and for many years, sailing in October, she made very
regular passages home, her average under Captain Bennett being 86
days for 12 passages.
“LOCH VENNACHAR.”
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 “LOCH VENNACHAR.”
Photo lent by F. G. Layton.
Larger image (219 kB)

Her first misfortune was in 1892, when she was dismasted during a
cyclone in the Southern Indian Ocean.
The following is an account of the disaster, given in the Melbourne
Argus:—
The Loch Vennachar left Glasgow bound for Melbourne on 6th April, 1892, with a
crew of 33 all told and 12 passengers, four of whom were ladies. All went well with the
ship until she reached lat. 39° 55′ S., long. 27° 21′ E., when at 8 o’clock on the
evening of 3rd June the barometer began to fall ominously and sail was promptly
shortened. Darkness lifted soon after 5 o’clock in the morning and the break of day
showed the terrific head seas that swept down upon the vessel, lashed by the north-
east gale. (At this time both watches were aloft fighting to make the foresail fast.)
Captain Bennett, who was on the poop, saw the danger of his crew and at once
resolved to sacrifice the sail. He sang out to the mate to send the men aft and the
hands, who had been lying out on the pitching foreyard, gained the deck in safety and
reached the poop in time. As they did so, two enormous waves bore down upon the
ship, which rode slowly over the first, and sank to an interminable depth in the trough
at the other side. Whilst in this position the second wave came on towering halfway up
the foremast, and broke on board, filling the lower topsail 60 feet above the deck, as it
came.
Hundreds of tons of water swept over the ship in a solid mass from stem to stern,
thundering inboard on the port side of the foc’s’le and racing away over the main deck
and over the poop, where most of the crew were standing. Every man on the poop was
thrown down, and when they regained their feet they perceived that the foremast and
mainmast were over the side, and the mizen topmast above their heads had
disappeared. Not a man on board actually saw the spars go or even heard the crash of
the breaking rigging so violent was the shock and so fierce the howling of the
hurricane. The cook was washed out of his galley and swept overboard, the galley
being completely gutted of everything it contained.

For nine days after her dismasting, Loch Vennachar lay

unmanageable, rolling in the trough of the sea, whilst the gale still
raged. At last with immense difficulty a jury mast was rigged forward
and a sail set on the stump of the mizen mast; in this trim Captain
Bennett managed to get his lame duck into Port Louis, Mauritius, after
five weeks under jury rig. The ship lay in Mauritius for five months whilst
new masts and spars were being sent out to her from England. On the
arrival of the masts, Captain Bennett and his crew showed their
smartness by completely rerigging her in 10 days, the cost of the refit
coming to £9071.
On 18th November Loch Vennachar at last proceeded on her voyage,
and after a light weather passage arrived in Port Phillip on 22nd
December 260 days out from the Clyde. As soon as her anchor was on
the ground, her crew assembled at the break of the poop and gave
three ringing cheers for Captain Bennett and his officers, who had
brought them safely through such a trying time. For saving his ship
under such difficulties, Captain Bennett was awarded Lloyd’s Medal, the
Victoria Cross of the Mercantile Marine.
In November, 1901, when anchored off Thameshaven outward bound
to Melbourne with general cargo, Loch Vennachar was run down by the
steamer Cato. The steamship struck her on the starboard bow, and the
Loch liner went down in 40 feet of water. All on board, however, were
saved, including a parrot and a cat, the only cat to escape out of seven
on the ship.
The Loch Vennachar lay at the bottom of the Thames for a month and
was then raised. After repairs and alterations to the value of about
£17,000 were made on her, she was pronounced by experts to be as
good as the day she was launched; and she once more resumed her
place in the Australian trade.
About September, 1905, when bound from Glasgow to Adelaide, she
came on the overdue list. On 6th September she was spoken “all well”
by the ss. Yongala, 160 miles west of Neptune Island. But as the days
passed and she did not arrive, grave anxiety began to be felt. On 29th
September, the ketch Annie Witt arrived at Adelaide, and her captain
reported picking up a reel of blue printing paper 18 miles N.W. of
Kangaroo Island. This paper was identified as part of Loch Vennachar’s
cargo. A search was made on Kangaroo Island and wreckage was
discovered which made the disaster only too sure. It was concluded that
she had run on the Young Rocks in trying to make the Backstairs
Passage. Captain Hawkins, late of the Loch Ness, was in command,
having taken her over from Captain Bennett the year before.
As if the fatal curse of Jonah had been transmitted from father to son,
T. R. Pearce, a son of the twice wrecked Tom Pearce, was one of the
apprentices lost in her.

lamis”—an Iron “Thermopylae.”

Salamis, one of the most beautiful little ships ever launched
and without doubt the fastest of all Thompson’s iron ships, was really an
enlarged Thermopylae in iron, as she was built from Bernard
Waymouth’s lines with a few minor alterations and improvements. The
following comparison of their measurements shows that Salamis was
roughly 100 tons larger and 10 feet longer than Thermopylae:—
Measurements Salamis Thermopylae
of Iron Ship Composite Ship
Registered tonnage net 1079 tons. 948 tons.
Registered tonnage gross 1130 „ 991 „
Registered tonnage under deck 1021 „ 927 „
Length 221.6 feet. 212 feet.
 Breadth 36 „ 36 „
Depth 21.7 „ 20.9 „
Depth moulded 23.7 „ 23.2 „

In Salamis, Thompson’s were determined to have an out and out

racer, and she was not fitted for passengers, her raised quarterdeck
being only 48 feet long as against Thermopylae’s 61 feet. She had a
tremendous sail plan and of course spread a full suit of stunsails and
other flying kites.
The following spar measurements show that she set even more
canvas than Thermopylae, her mainyard being a foot longer, and the
other yards in proportion:—
SPAR PLAN OF SALAMIS.
Mainmast—deck to truck 150 Feet
Main lower mast 66 „
Main topmast 52 „
Main topgallant mast 34 „
Main royal mast 23 „
Main masthead 2 „
Main lower doublings 15 „
Main topmast doublings 12 „
Mainyard 81 „
Main lower topsail yard 72 „
Main upper topsail yard 64 „
Main lower topgallant yard 57 „
Main upper topgallant yard 49 „
Main royal yard 37 „
Jibboom 66 „

Messrs. Thompson, when they gave Hood the order for Salamis,
intended her for the same round as Thermopylae—out to Melbourne
with general cargo, then across to China and home again with tea. But
by 1875 the steamers had got a firm hold on the tea trade, and the
clippers were either being driven away into other trades or had to
content themselves with loading at a cut rate in the N.E. monsoon; and
practically only Cutty Sark and Thermopylae were still given a chance to
load the new teas. This was not a bright outlook for a newcomer with
her reputation all to make, and the only time Salamis loaded a tea cargo
home was on her second voyage when she came home from Hong Kong
in 110 days. In 1878 she made another attempt to get a tea cargo
home, but freights were specially bad this year, and she was withdrawn
from the berth at Shanghai, and finally came home with wool from Port
Phillip.
 “SALAMIS.”
Photo lent by F. G. Layton.
Larger image (243 kB)
 “THOMAS STEPHENS,” “CAIRNBULG,” “BRILLIANT,” AND “CUTTY
SARK,” in Sydney Harbour.
Larger image (275 kB)

As a wool clipper she set up a wonderful record; her average for 13

consecutive passages to Melbourne being 75 days pilot to pilot, and for
her outward passages from 1875 to 1895 her average was 77 days.
Homeward with wool, like all iron ships, she occasionally got hung up
and topped the 100 days, nevertheless here she also had the best
average for an iron ship, of 87 days for 18 consecutive wool passages
from Melbourne to London. Her best run from London to the equator
was made in 18½ days. Twice she ran from the equator to the Cape
meridian in 21 days, and twice she ran her easting down from the Cape
meridian to Cape Otway in 22½ days, and no less than four times in 23
days. Captain Phillip left the Harlaw to take the Salamis, and his name is
associated with her during the whole of her life under the British flag.
 On her maiden passage Salamis left London on 6th July, took her
departure from the Start on the 10th, then had very buffling winds to
the equator, which she crossed on 2nd August in 25° W.; the S.E. trades
were very poor and she had to make a tack off the Abrolhos Rocks. The
Cape meridian was crossed on 24th August in 44° S. Running her
easting down, the wind was very changeable, being mostly from the
south’ard, and without any steady breezes her best run was only 304
knots. She passed the Otway on 16th September and entered Port
Phillip Heads the same evening, 68 days from Start Point.
On her second voyage she had a very protracted start, losing three
anchors and chains in the Downs and also a man overboard during a
very severe gale. She had to slip her third anchor and get underweigh in
a hurry to avoid dragging ashore. After this she had to go into Plymouth
to get new anchors and chains. She finally left Plymouth on 24th March,
1876, the “dead horse” being actually up the day she left Plymouth. She
took her departure from the Lizard on 25th March, crossed the line on
18th April, and had light winds to the meridian of the Cape, which she
crossed on 14th May in 43° S.
In 69° E. she encountered bad weather, and shipped a heavy sea
whilst running under a fore topsail. This sea broke over the quarter,
smashed the wheel and broke in the cabin skylight, and she had to be
hove to for 14 hours whilst repairs were made. The main upper topsail
had also blown away and a new one had to be bent.
She eventually made Cape Otway at 10.30 p.m. on 7th June, entering
the Heads early morning of the 8th, 75 days from the Lizards. In
crossing to China, she went from Sydney to Shanghai in 32 days. Failing
to get a tea cargo in Shanghai, she ran down to Hong Kong through the
Formosa Channel with a strong N.E. monsoon in two days and some odd
hours, but, of course, she was nearly new and in ballast.
In 1878 she again tried for a tea cargo, crossing from Sydney in 43
days: after a very tempestuous passage of 83 days from London to
Sydney, during which she continually had to be hove to, indeed, Captain
Phillip declared that he had never met with such heavy gales during 30
years’ experience, even so she was only 79 days from the Channel to
Cape Otway.
 She found tea freights slumping very badly at Shanghai, and was
finally placed on the berth for general cargo only at 30s. per 50 cubic
feet. Salamis left Shanghai on 26th November in company with
Thermopylae, which was the only sailing ship to get a tea cargo for
London. The two ships made the Straits of Sunda on 15th December,
but were compelled to anchor off Sumatra owing to the strong N.E.
current. Here they found a fleet of 37 sail all vainly trying to get past
Thwart-the-way Island.
Of this fleet the first to get through was Thermopylae after several
ineffectual attempts, but she was closely followed by her iron sister ship;
clearing Java Head on 29th December after a delay of 14 days, the two
sisters squared away for the S.E. trades, and left the fleet of 37 ships to
wait patiently until the N.E. current slackened.
Salamis carried the trades to 32° S., and then made some fine running
to the Australian Coast, her best day’s work being 336 miles. On 26th
January, 1879, she arrived off Port Phillip Heads and anchored off
Queenscliff to await orders. She was sent up to Sydney and loaded coal
alongside the Cutty Sark. On 18th March Cutty Sark sailed for Shanghai
with 1150 tons of coal, Salamis followed on the 20th with 1200 tons of
coal. Unfortunately I have no details of the race across, except that
Salamis made the run in 37 days. Both ships failed to get a tea cargo for
the London market, and Cutty Sark went off to Manila, whilst Salamis
went to Foochow, and took a tea cargo from there to Melbourne, which
she reached in time to load wool home, after a very light weather
passage of 64 days. After this unsatisfactory voyage Salamis was kept
steadily in the Melbourne trade, with the exception of one passage to
Sydney.
When the Aberdeen White Star sold their sailing ships, Salamis went
to the Norwegians, who stripped the yards off her mizen mast and
turned her into a barque. After several weary years of threadbare old
age, the beautiful little clipper was finally wrecked on Malden Island in
the South Pacific on 20th May, 1905.

e Colonial Barque “Woollahra.”

The pretty little barque, Woollahra, owned by Cowlislaw Bros.,
of Sydney, had a very fair turn of speed, and on more than one occasion
 showed up well against some of the crack ships in the trade. In her later
years she used to run from Newcastle, N.S.W., to Frisco with coal. She
came to her end on Tongue Point, near Cape Terawhite, New Zealand,
whilst bound in ballast from Wellington to Kaipara, to load Kauri lumber
for Australia. She was wrecked about half a mile from the homestead of
a sheep station, the only habitation on the coast for miles. The captain
and an ordinary seaman were drowned, the rest of her complement
getting safely ashore. She went to pieces very quickly and there was not
even an odd spar or deck fitting left a few months afterwards.

assiope” and “Parthenope.”

Cassiope and Parthenope were actually sister ships though by
different builders. They were both fine fast clippers of the best Liverpool
type. Cassiope, however, had a short life, being lost with all hands in
1885, when bound to London with Heap’s Rangoon rice, under the well-
known Captain Rivers. Parthenope was sold in her old age to the Italians
and rechristened Pelogrino O. On the 31st July, 1907, she sailed with
coals from Newcastle, N.S.W., for Antofagasta and never arrived.

afalgar.”
D. Rose & Co.’s Trafalgar was a very regular Sydney trader. She
went to the Norwegians and was still afloat, owned in Christiania, when
the war broke out.
 “WOOLLAHRA.”
From a painting.
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PASSAGES UNDER 80 DAYS TO SYDNEY IN 1875.

Crossed Passed
Crossed Days
Ship Departure Cape S.W. Cape Arrived
Equator Out
Meridian Tasmania
Cutty Sark Lizard Nov. 29 Dec. 21 Jan. 13 ’76 Feb. 4 ’76 Feb. 12 ’76 75
Samuel Plimsoll Falmouth Aug. 8 Sept. 4 Sept. 28 Oct. 19 Oct. 22 75
(Otway)

PASSAGES UNDER 80 DAYS TO MELBOURNE IN 1875.

Crossed Passed
Crossed Days
Ship Departure Cape Cape Arrived
Equator Out
Meridian Otway
Thermopylae Lizard Dec. 3 Dec. 24 Jan. 14 ’76 Feb. 7 ’76 Feb. 9 ’76 68
Salamis Start July 10 Aug. 2 Aug. 24 Sept. 16 Sept. 16 68
 Mermerus Tuskar July 27 Aug. 15 Oct. 1Oct. 1 68
Loch Garry Tuskar Nov. 8 Dec. 5 Dec. 29 Jan. 20 ’76 73
City of Corinth Start Sept. 4 Sept. 27 Oct. 21 Nov. 16 Nov. 16 73
Loch Maree Scilly Aug. 8 Sept. 5 Sept. 26 Oct. 21 74
Romanoff Lizard Aug. 10 Sept. 5 Oct. 22 Oct. 23 74
Loch Vennachar Inistrahull Sept. 6 Oct. 10 Oct. 28 Nov. 18 Nov. 19 74
Wasdale Tuskar Aug. 7 Sept. 4 Sept. 26 Oct. 20 74
Moravian Lizard May 26 June 22 Aug. 9 75
City of Agra Start May 31 June 24 Aug. 15 76
Ben Cruachan Tuskar June 7 July 1 July 29 Aug. 23 77
Parthenope Tuskar June 9 June 29 Aug. 25 77
Glengarry Tuskar Feb. 26 Mar. 22 May 14 77
Old Kensington Channel Feb. 3 Apl. 21 Apl. 22 78
Loch Katrine Holyhead May 7 July 25 79

tes on Passages to Australia in 1875.

In no year were so many magnificent iron clippers launched as
in 1875, and of the ships which made the passage to Melbourne in
under 80 days no less than five, namely, Salamis, Loch Garry, Loch
Vennachar, Parthenope and Old Kensington, were on their maiden
passages. Loch Garry’s best run in the 24 hours was 333 miles, and Loch
Vennachar did a week’s work of 2065 miles, viz., 285, 290, 320, 320,
312, 268 and 270. Samuel Plimsoll, with 360 emigrants on board, left
Plymouth on 6th August, at 11.15 p.m.; on the same day she ran into
and sank the Italian barque Enrica, though without damage to herself.
She saved the Italian’s crew and put into Falmouth to land them.
Captain Richards left the Thomas Stephens in order to tune up
Parthenope. He made the latter travel, but as he returned to the
Thomas Stephens in 1876 he evidently preferred his old clipper.
Thermopylae still maintained her wonderful reputation; on this trip
she averaged 270 miles a day from 23° W. to 100° E.
The Old Kensington was a very fine ship with a good turn of speed,
and she usually loaded home from Calcutta or San Francisco.
The Wasdale must not be confused with the later Wasdale, which was
not launched until 1881. This one must have been a very fast ship, for
on this passage she made five 24-hour runs over 300, her best being
332 miles.
 Many well-known heelers were just over the 80 days; for instance,
Miltiades was 81 days from the Start, Thessalus 83 from the Lizards,
Theophane 83 from the Tuskar, Cassiope 81 from the Tuskar, Marpesia
83 from the Tuskar, Thyatira 80 from the Start, all to Melbourne, whilst
Patriarch was 82 days from Torbay to Sydney.
Two writers to the Nautical Magazine, both of whom were serving on
the Cutty Sark during her 1875-6 voyage, claim that she was 50 miles
south of Melbourne on her 54th day out from the Channel, and that
owing to strong head winds she was compelled to go round Australia.
As will be seen, she was 67 days from the Lizard to the S.W. Cape,
Tasmania, and I fear that a mistake of ten days has been made. Captain
Watson also stated in a personal letter to me that she ran 2163 miles in
six days. I have 14 years of her abstract logs, and from what her logs
tell me I consider that she was quite capable of accomplishing such a
run with a strong steady breeze, but it is very rarely that you get such a
breeze for six days on end even in the roaring forties. She left London
on 20th November but collided with the Somersetshire off Gravesend,
and lost her main topgallant mast, besides other damage, so that she
had to put back to refit.

r Walter Raleigh.”
The Sir Walter Raleigh, commanded by Captain W. Purvis, was
a very well-known and regular wool clipper of the type of Romanoff. I do
not think she was quite in the first flight, but she was never very far
behind, and in 1880 she shared with Ben Voirlich the distinction of
making the best outward run of the year.
The following extracts are from Patriarch’s log, when homeward
bound in 1878, 79 days out from Sydney.
Feb. 8.—18° 41′ N., long. 38° 55′ W.—Spoke the Sir Walter Raleigh, Melbourne to
London, 77 days out.
Feb. 9.—Sir Walter Raleigh still in company.
Feb. 10.—Sir Walter Raleigh ahead.
Feb. 11.—Sir Walter Raleigh dead to windward.
Feb. 12 to 16.—Sir Walter Raleigh still in company.
 In the end Patriarch got home a day ahead, Sir Walter Raleigh making
the best passage by a day. Sir Walter Raleigh was probably faster in light
and moderate winds than in strong, as I can find no very big runs to her
credit.
On the 10th November, 1888, she left Sydney for London, wool-laden,
and was wrecked near Boulogne on 29th January, 1889, when only 80
days out and almost in sight of home. Five of her crew were drowned. It
was a tragic end to what promised to be the best wool passage of her
career.

ch Fyne” and “Loch Long.”

These two 1200-ton sister ships from Thomson’s yard, though
fine wholesome ships, were not considered quite as fast as the earlier
“Lochs,” though each of them put up a 75-day passage to Melbourne,
Loch Fyne on her second voyage in 1877-8, and the Loch Long in 1884.
The Loch Fyne left Lyttelton, N.Z., on 4th May, 1883, under Captain T.
H. Martin, with 15,000 bags of wheat bound for the Channel for orders
and never arrived.
In January, 1903, Loch Long arrived in Hobson’s Bay from Glasgow,
commanded by Captain Strachan. From Melbourne she was sent to New
Caledonia to load nickel ore. She sailed on 29th April, but failed to
arrive. Portions of wreckage, however, were washed up on the Chatham
Islands, which made it only too certain that she had struck on the rocks
and gone down with all hands.

istides”—The Aberdeen White Star Flagship.

In March, 1876, Messrs. Hood launched the beautiful passenger
clipper Aristides, the largest of all Thompson’s sailing ships. Captain R.
Kemball of Thermopylae fame, the commodore of the Aberdeen White
Star fleet, was given command of her, and she became the firm’s
flagship.
On her maiden voyage she sailed from London on 6th July, and
arrived in Port Phillip on 18th September—74 days out (69 days from the
land). Leaving Melbourne on 28th November, she arrived in the Thames
on 17th February, 81 days out, beating two such well-known clippers as
Loch Maree and Collingwood, which had sailed on 27th November, by 18
days. The Aberdeen White Star ships invariably made fine maiden
voyages. Their captains always left port with the firm intention of
breaking the record, and they had every help from their owners, the
ships being most carefully loaded with their Plimsoll marks well out of
water. Crews also were picked men, and gear, of course, everything of
the best.
 “ARISTIDES.”
Photo by Hall & Co., Sydney.
Larger image (154 kB)

Aristides was kept on the Melbourne run until 1889, when she went
out to Sydney in 85 days. From this date she was kept in the Sydney
trade. She usually had a full passenger list and being perfectly run like
all the Aberdeen ships she was a favourite both in Sydney and
Melbourne. Captain Kemball retired in 1887, and Captain Spalding had
 her until the early nineties, then Captain Allan took her over; her last
commander was Captain Poppy, who was lost in her.
Her best 24-hour run that I have record of was 320 miles. Her
passages, both outward and homeward, were very regular, from 78 to
88 days as a rule, but she never beat the times of her maiden voyage.
When the Aberdeen White Star sold their sailing ships, they refused to
part with the Aristides, and she remained under their flag till the end.
On 28th May, 1903, she sailed from Caleta Buena with nitrate of soda
for San Francisco and was posted as missing. H.M. ships Amphion and
Shearwater made a search amongst the islands on her route for the
missing ship, but no trace of her was ever found.

myrna.”
The Smyrna, which was built on fuller lines than most of
Thompson’s ships, came to a tragic end, being run into by the steamer
Moto on 28th April, 1888, during a thick fog off the Isle of Wight, when
outward bound to Sydney, and sank with Captain Taylor and 11 of her
crew.

e “Harbinger.”
The Harbinger was built to lower the colours of the wonderful
Torrens in the Adelaide trade, being fitted to carry a large number of
passengers. Indeed she was the last sailing ship specially built and fitted
for carrying passengers. In more ways than one she was a remarkable
vessel, and differed in many interesting details from the stock type of
Clyde-built iron clipper.
In her rigging and sail plan, she had various fittings which were
peculiar to herself.
To begin with, she was the only iron ship which had the old-fashioned
channels to spread the rigging: and in another way she went back many
years by never bending a sail on her crossjack yard. Instead of this sail
she spread a large hoisting spanker, and she always carried a main
spencer or storm trysail, a sail very often seen on down east Cape
Horners, who found it very useful when trying to make westing off Cape
Stiff.
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