"Looking through my essuie-cul de réserve": The New Faber and Faber Beckett

With their new set of Beckett editions, Faber & Faber promises to collect, "for the first time[,] all of Samuel Beckett's work"² in a series. Faber has been the British rights-holder and publisher of Samuel Beckett's drama since September 1955, a month or so after Waiting for Godot was first performed in London. They did not, however, take up the option on his fiction or poetry. On Beckett's own account, these were thought too difficult to be successful, and also at risk of obscenity charges in a way that the drama was not.³ The fact that Beckett's novels had been appearing with Olympia, a press known for its pornographic publications as much as for Nabokov's Lolita, would perhaps not have helped in this regard. Options on prose and poetry went instead to John Calder. Faber's delayed acquisition of these rights in 2007 was widely reported in trade journals and national media, coinciding with Calder's own retirement and sale of the business. New editions from all three branches began to emerge in 2009 and have flowed steadily since. Seventeen volumes are now in print (eleven prose, five drama, and one poetry), with a total of twenty titles due to complete Faber's initial series.⁴

"Series" is a somewhat loaded term in the life of Beckett's writing. In a letter of 1947 to his then literary agent George Reavey, Beckett referred to the as-yet unpublished novel Watt as "an unsatisfactory book" before adding: "But it has its place in the series, as will perhaps appear in time."⁵ As John Pilling has previously remarked, this must have elicited some surprise even from Reavey since at that point Beckett was still the author of only one published novel (Murphy, with Dream of Fair to Middling Women on ice).⁶ Now, the trickiness of the word has become a little different: while there are plenty of texts to go into a series, latent questions about completeness, ordering and continuity attend—or rather are integral to—the Beckett oeuvre.

So far, at least, Faber's series is "complete with missing parts," as Beckett (or his avatar "B.") remarks of the painter Tal Coat in the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit.⁷ Beckett's critical writings are currently absent, including the essential Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, although a volume is planned for the future. By contrast, there are no plans to reissue the controversial posthumous publications Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleutheria, which are also absent from the oeuvre. This troublesome pair, the bane of numerous publishers, as David Tucker has recently shown, have never achieved the sort of standing that Beckett's other works have, but their very naiveties make them essential reading.⁸ Beckett's reluctance to have them published was also surely due to the embarrassment he felt at launching anew a self long gone, and his response to the prospect of a complete works was unambiguous: "What must not in any case appear there is Eleutheria."⁹ But the release of these half-wild creatures cannot be undone, and one might reasonably expect the well known deficiencies of their earlier publications to be addressed in a systematic manner.

Instead, there is an understandable preference for novelty, such as the previously unpublished story Echo's Bones, which is due to come out for the first time later this year in a critical edition edited by Mark Nixon. It is not clear at present whether critical editions will constitute a separate series of publications; in an essay on Beckett and Faber in Publishing Samuel Beckett, C. J. Ackerley notes that "other texts have been mentioned, but Faber has not yet committed itself to an extensive series."¹⁰ Still, the rights acquisition has spurred new editorial work that figures substantively in this current set of titles.

The volumes have a distinctive appearance that has attracted some attention in the design press, with a feature in Creative Review. Produced by the studio and type foundry A2...