A Beckett Canon

1946: J’Ouvre la Série

1946
J’Ouvre la Série [I open the series] Beckett spent his ‹rst few months in postwar Paris learning the sad fate of friends. Joyce had died in Zurich in 1941, and his faithful amanuensis Paul Léon was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Alfred Péron, perhaps Beckett’s closest French friend, had been tortured in a concentration camp; he died in Switzerland on his way home on May 16, 1945 (Bair, 341). It is impossible to imagine Beckett reveling in Paris scenes of post-Liberation jubilation. Beckett’s most fertile creative period began early in 1946, but light verse in English probably precedes it. An undated, unpublished poem in the Beckett Archive at RUL is marked in Beckett’s hand: “1946, after St.-Lô.” 1946
“Antipepsis” A synonym for the title is “indigestion,” and the poem’s twenty-four lines constitute a witty sally at intellectual indigestion. Unusual in a Beckett poem are the (rough) tetrameter rhyming couplets with occasional enjambment (to which Walter Draf‹n was sensitive in Dream). It is possible that Beckett’s poem is an adverse comment on himself, or perhaps on another Trinity graduate in France. Beginning with the cliché about the cart before the horse (changed by Beckett to an ass), the poem soon equates the cart with the mind. Sent to a “foreign part,” the mind runs amok, spreading the rumor: “A thought has taken place!” The city reacts with panic, and the poem concludes somewhat mysteriously: “Bring forth your dead! Bring forth your dead!” Is the thought then dead, or is the bassackwards thought wholly inap127 The “Antipepsis” typescript, dated 1946, is at RUL. It has been published in Metre, December 3, 1997, 5. Phyllis Gaffney persuasively links “Antipepsis” with “The Capital of the Ruins” and Beckett’s postwar experience with the Irish Red Cross. propriate to a “foreign part,” which is still shivering from the recent war? Phyllis Gaffney’s 1990a summary is apposite: “‘Antipepsis’ denotes a world upside down, an absurd world where the cart comes before the ass, and where reason has expired” (273). Beckett thought little of the poem, since he did not even mention it to Harvey. It is nevertheless of some interest that the privations of postwar Paris failed to erode Beckett’s sense of humor. In its anti-intellectualism, the poem resembles Le Monde et le pantalon. When the scholar John Fletcher attempted to date Beckett’s ‹rst sustained French ‹ction, the author wrote him: “Mercier et Camier was ‹rst attempt at novel in French and cannot have preceded Nouvelles” (Federman and Fletcher, 63). However, the dates on Beckett’s manuscripts contradict his memory. The French section of the story La Fin was begun in March 1946; the novel Mercier et Camier was penned between May and September, the story L’Expulsé between October 6 and 14, and the story Premier Amour between October 28 and November 12. The story Le Calmant, begun on December 23, terminated Beckett’s ‹rst postwar year, along with that phase of his vision.1 Although Beckett had lived in France for nearly a decade when he began his matchless series of works in French, his creative language was an invention, as Jean-Jacques Mayoux realized: “Le personnage beckettien semble se con‹er, se confesser plutôt, interminablement, à un auditeur imaginaire, dans une forme mixte, orale juste assez avec à l’occasion une bonne grossièrté, pour le reste une tenue singulière. Dans l’ensemble, Beckett écrivain français invente un langage” (1972, 34) [The Beckettian character seems interminably to con‹de in, or rather confess to, an imaginary listener, in a mixed voice, somewhat oral with the occasional vulgarity, but otherwise a singular quality. On the whole, Beckett as a French writer invents a language]. La Fin (The End) La Fin resembles Watt in its focus on a skullscape and in its thickets of description into which dialogue occasionally—and hilariously—intrudes; the merciless repetitions of Watt’s “he said” translate into the equally relentless “dit-il.” Yet La Fin is a radical new departure in Beckett’s ‹ction. An anonymous narrator-protagonist says “I,” and he tells a story featuring at once excruciating detail and cosmological sweep. Irrational and reason-ridden, a beckett canon: 1946 128 La Fin is a Beckett manuscript treasure, now at Burns Library, Boston College. Begun in English, this untitled story shifted to French midway through the narration. In Beckett’s bilingual holograph notebook, the English part is frequently dated...