Samuel Beckett’s Library by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon (review)

While critical discussions of Samuel Beckett’s writings continue to appear at a torrential rate, some of the most interesting, insightful, and helpful recent Beckett scholarship lies at what might at first seem to be the periphery, or within the life, of this quite private writer. What I have in mind includes The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow, and Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-1937.¹

Now Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon have combined forces to assess and exhaustively scrutinize the previously inaccessible 750 volumes, other “material manifestation[s] of knowledge,” and “the labyrinthine world of creation” that Beckett left behind in his Paris flat, as well as, to the extent they were able to track them down, those items that now reside elsewhere (xiii). After an opening chapter on the kinds of traces and readerly trackings that Beckett left in his books—underlinings, marginalia, marks and notes, inscriptions, dog-eared pages, and interlardings—and in his notebooks, Samuel Beckett’s Library categorizes the collection into literature (in English, French, German, and Italian), classics, philosophy, religion, dictionaries, reference works, science, music, and art, and then enumerates and investigates the individual markings for their potential significance in Beckett’s life, thought, and creative process. Van Hulle and Nixon not only characterize both the readings and the reading traces contained in his books, but they also call upon their seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Beckett’s life, diaries, letters, fiction, and plays to demonstrate precisely when the traces were likely to have been made (a number of items are textbooks from Beckett’s school days), what impact the readings seem to have had on his thinking and writings, and even when one should be skeptical regarding who actually made the marks. They wisely offer the further caution that “the extant materials … are merely a fraction of what the author has ever read or written” (11).

Placing the library’s contents into a context with other manuscript material such as drafts, notebooks, and diaries, Samuel Beckett’s Library examines the ways in which Beckett absorbed, translated, and transmitted his reading into his own thought and work. As they discuss Beckett’s reading habits and interests, Van Hulle and Nixon thus illuminate his cultural and intellectual world (including the “systematic and scholarly approach in his study of English literature”—23) and reveal much about how his reading engendered his writing. The many fascinating examples cited include books by and about Samuel Johnson (a major influence on Beckett throughout the 1930s, most obviously on his aborted play, “Human Wishes”²); marginalia in Jean Racine’s Théâtre complet (Happy Days) and the Journal of Jules Renard (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Echo’s Bones, and Waiting for Godot);³ a dog-ear marking the article on Manichaeism in the Encyclopedia Britannica (which inspired Krapp’s Last Tape);⁴ notebook excerpts from Homer that appear in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and other early works; and a scrap of paper in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull marking a passage that may have influenced the writing of Godot.⁵ The book also explores numerous Beckett notes and tracings in the works of writers who profoundly affected his thinking or style, or at least resonated for him, even when they do not appear explicitly in his writings: Dante Alighieri, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for example, as well as such highly influential philosophers as René Descartes, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, especially, Arthur Schopenhauer. The extended discussion of Beckett’s readings, notes, and use of Charles Darwin (“Darwin proved to be just as useful for Beckett’s ‘decreation’ [in Endgame, for example] as the Book of Genesis”—206) is particularly engaging and instructive.⁶ Unsurprisingly, given his skeptical attitude toward language, his musical talent, and his...