A Beckett Canon

1932–33: Intricate Festoons of Words

1932–33
Intricate Festoons of Words 1932
Beckett’s new career began modestly with a short poem. Beckett told Harvey that the title came from the name of a beer, in which he indulged copiously while on Christmas vacation in Kassel, Germany. However, Pilling (1999a) has shown that the poem is nourished by Beckett’s study of the French troubadour poets. “Dortmunder” This poem resembles an alba or aubade in its appreciation of erotic joys of the night. The beloved is a lute-playing bawd in a brothel, and the lover, through biblical reference, becomes a scribe—“Habbakuk, mard of all sinners .” Structurally, the poem is a free-form, unrhymed sonnet, like the earlier “Yoke of Liberty.” The opening quatrain sets the brothel scene. The next ‹ve lines evoke the beloved, and the following three lines announce the lover. By the ‹nal (unrhyming) couplet, “Schopenhauer is dead,” along with his sublimation of desire. Although “the bawd / puts her lute away” at dawn, “the long night phrase” has been seductive. Coughlan has perceptively paired “Dortmunder” with “Alba,” which are placed on facing pages in the collection Echo’s Bones: both poems evoke Scripture, and both are bathed in music and light. “But unlike the way ‘Alba’ steers itself successfully towards white counter-revelatory emptiness, ‘Dort33 “Dortmunder” was written in January, 1932. A typescript, rejected in 1934 by the Chicago-based Poetry, is the earliest extant version—now at ICU. It is the ‹fth poem in Echo’s Bones, and Beckett annotated it in the copy at HRC: “Cassel revisited” (sic). It was reprinted in transition (June 1936) and is found in Poems. In the Beckett Circle (spring 1998) John Pilling traces the poem’s origin to Jean Beck’s La Musique des Troubadours, not to the German beer about which Beckett told Harvey. munder’ ends with the scribe Habbakuk noting the bawd’s ‘dissolution’” (195). The scribe has nevertheless recorded the process of that dissolution, having borrowed and translated exotic phrases from Louis Laloy’s La Musique chinoise (Lawlor). Beckett traveled from Kassel to Paris in February; he remained there through June, his main occupation being his novel Dream. His story Sedendo et Quiescendo appeared in the March 1932 issue of transition. That issue began with a manifesto, “Poetry Is Vertical,” to which nine signatures are af‹xed—Hans Arp, Samuel Beckett, Carl Einstein, Eugene Jolas, Thomas McGreevy (sic), Georges Pelorson, Theo Rutra, James J. Sweeney, Ronald Symond. A more accurate title would be “Poetry Is Mantic,” and although Beckett later denied (to me) that he had a hand in the composition of the manifesto, at least one of its ringing sentences was consonant with his practice : “The ‹nal disintegration of the ‘I’ in the creative act is made possible by the use of a language which is a mantic instrument, and which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, going even so far as to invent a hermetic language, if necessary.” Joyce was, of course, the master inventor of a hermetic language, and he shadowed not only Beckett ’s early ‹ction but some of his verse. “Text” “Text” is a neutral title that Beckett had already used the previous year for another poem. In this “prose-poem diapason” (Gross, 83) a woman, like Joyce’s Molly Bloom, is in bed with her cuckolded lover. Although “Text” names neither its female speaker nor her “cheerfully cornuted Dublin landloper ,” they may be the Smeraldina and Belacqua (as they certainly are when Beckett revised the prose poem for his novel, Dream). The text opens on erotic invitation: “Come come and cull me.” It then rollicks, Joycean fashion , through a lexicon of sexual suggestions—“twingle-twangler, shamehill, puck‹sted coxcomb, doty’s potystick, opened its rose and struck with its thorn, Greek galligaskins.”1 The female persona is imaged as a coalcave, a cowslip, a lettuce leaf, a rose, a squab, a mare, whereas her partner is relentlessly phallic. For all its sexual lexicon, however, the speaker spurns her suitor, as Pilling notes: “the lover who speaks ‘Text’ has been obliged by her ‘week of redness’ to sacri‹ce, or at least temporarily suspend her lovemaka beckett canon: 1932–33 34 A typescript of “Text” is found in the Leventhal papers at HRC. First published in the New Review (April 1932), it is reprinted as a “prose fragment” by Harvey and is available in CSP. Gross is the only other scholar beside myself who classi‹es “Text” as a...