Publishing Samuel Beckett (review)

Setting out to examine "how publishers responded to Beckett's work and the way in which he was marketed" and "Beckett's own attitude toward the business of publishing, the market and the reader" (dust-jacket), this volume provides a great deal of previously overlooked information about those who helped Beckett succeed as a professional writer. Produced in collaboration with the British Library and edited by the Director of the Beckett International Foundation, the book is of a very high quality, the range of authors is first class, and the coverage is comprehensive. The essays address Beckett's entire career, during his lifetime and beyond, from his "Dealings with the Firm of Chatto & Windus" and his work with John Calder, Les Éditions de Minuit, Faber, Grove and Suhrkamp Verlag, to the "Afterlife of Beckett's Canon" as it is revealed through "Electronic Publishing" and "Posthumous controversies." Frankly, the book is long overdue, offering a pragmatic understanding of a career that has, for too long, been mystified.

The collection provides a wide range of perspectives and approaches. On the one hand it illustrates that, as the editor suggests, "there is a sense in which Beckett did not care whether his work met with approval or not" (7); on the other, it suggests that, as Stan Gontarski puts it, "Beckett was only too keen to participate in. . . publicity" (143). Like a number of writers in the collection, Nixon treats the author's fictional representation of the visual artist in "Three Dialogues" as though it were a description of essential qualities in Beckett's attitude towards his professional life. But the strength of the volume is that it includes authors who de-mystify his authorial persona, revealing his active participation in the commercial world of publishing.

The editorial assumption that Beckett accepted his fate, being published rather than actively working to be published, has a downside. It is, perhaps, why Publishing Samuel Beckett gives little sense of how much Beckett earned after 1945 and only offers glimpses of the magnificent profits earned by his publishers and estate: to document the income from publishing Samuel Beckett would expose the difference between the author and the man, highlighting his status as a successful literary entrepreneur who achieved a very comfortable lifestyle and a high level of control over his published work, his public image, and his posthumous legacy. Another downside to the collection is its failure to include essays on Suzanne Dumesnil, who negotiated his first post-war contracts, and Con Leventhal, who worked as his personal administrative assistant for over a decade, starting in 1963. Like George Reavey, Toni Clerkx, Jerome Lindon, Barney Rosset, John Calder, and other professional publishers and agents, Dumesnil and Leventhal were instrumental as Beckett transformed himself from just another Joycean writer into a major literary force. Dumesnil helped put the author on the literary map in post-war Paris; Leventhal was instrumental in establishing Beckett as a viable candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1969.

But this is, perhaps, nit-picking. Publishing Samuel Beckett marks an important step forward in our understanding of Beckett's life as a professional writer. Many of the essays provide valuable descriptions of the work done to promote Beckett's career in publishing; a handful engage in active critique. Accounts of the contributions by Chatto and Windus, Maurice Girodias, George Reavey, Edward Titus, Richard Seaver, and Transition magazine supplement the extant biographies; as do the essays on Les Editions de Minuit, Olympia Press, and Suhrkamp Verlag. Chris Ackerley's discussion of the role of Faber and Faber is excellent. Assuming that Beckett's "practice simply did not accord with his principles" (180), Ackerley opens new ways of understanding the complex, often "inexplicable," publication history of texts caught in the destabilizing and "impossible triangulation between authorial intention . . . commercial publishing . . . and academic scholarship" (183). Seán Kennedy's "Beckett Publishing in Ireland, 1929-1956" is another gem. Applying Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about "habitus and the field of cultural production" to...