[In the following excerpt, Cochran surveys Beckett's early short fiction, including his short story collection More Pricks than Kicks.]

“ASSUMPTION”

Samuel Beckett was 23, a scholar in the making recently arrived in Paris as lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure, when his first published study appeared in the spring of 1929. An auspicious debut, it was the lead essay in the imposingly titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays in promotion and defense of what became Finnegans Wake. The young Beckett's work was titled “Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” and it was soon printed separately in the literary journal transition, along with another effort by the author. This other was no learned article, however, but a short story. Titled “Assumption,” it was brief, running only four pages in print, and riddled with typos. It opened as in retrospect it needed to open, as if art imitated criticism, in brazen contradiction: “He could have shouted and could not.”¹ Later, in more famous formulations, this trick will seem a badge of the author's presence, so much so that one instance will be a title, Imagination Dead Imagine, and a sampler of his work will utilize another, I Can't Go On I'll Go On, for its title.

“Assumption” centers its attention on a doomed figure, an adept of silence who is “partly artist” (269) by virtue of his “remarkable faculty of whispering the turmoil down” (268), but who is also, and fatally, partly man by virtue of a “wild rebellious surge that aspired violently toward realization in sound” (269). The most rigorous self-control has been necessary, and a terrible price has been exacted: “He felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions” (269-70). Not only will the unruly urge not subside—“He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released”—he is not even sure he wants it to: “he felt compassion as well as fear; he dreaded lest his prisoner should escape, he longed that it might escape; it tore at his throat and he choked it back in dread and sorrow” (269). Perhaps this incertitude is responsible for his status as less than wholly artist, as if the artist as artist can only exist in a relationship of hostility to the artist as man or woman.

This, then, is the troubled situation at the story's opening, and also at the story's midpoint, for action, here, has taken a definite backseat to description. But action there is, finally, in the classic sense. Even for this Adam there is an Eve, identified here merely as “the Woman,” who intrudes one evening at dusk, speaking: “It was the usual story, vulgarly told: admiration for his genius, sympathy with his suffering, only a woman could understand” (270). The isolato's first reaction is fury, but soon he is “struck in spite of himself by the extraordinary pallor of her lips” (270). Other, similar attractions are described, including “a close-fitting hat of faded green felt” (270). The total ensemble rouses the until recently immured semiartist to something like oxymoron: “he thought he had never seen such charming shabbiness” (270).

The woman stays, and returns on subsequent evenings. Her initial departure is attended by ambivalent reflections that are reported in detail: “When at last she went away he felt that something had gone out from him, something he could not spare, but still less could grudge, something of the desire to live” (270). These losses accumulate, each evening with “this woman” costing him “a part of his essential animality” (270), and thus hastening the day when the “implacable caged resentment” (269) within will overwhelm him.

The end, apparently, for the prose here is at once turgid and oblique, a strange mélange, arrives in two stages. The first seems to be sexual: “Until at last, for the first time, he was unconditioned by the Satanic dimensional Trinity, he was released, achieved [sic] the blue flower, Vega, GOD.” It sounds glorious, but the morning after is a very different matter: “he found himself in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence” (271). This cycle, too, is repeated, so that “each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness” (271).

They could not go on like this, that is clear enough, and stage two of the end arrives in the penultimate paragraph. The woman is looking at “the face that she had overlaid with death” when suddenly “she was swept aside by a great storm of sound,” a “triumphant” cry that shook the house, “climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea.” The final paragraph, after all this rattle and purple, caps the story nicely: “They found her caressing his wild dead hair” (271).

Given some experience with Beckett's later, better known work, it is possible to discern recurrent elements here receiving early exercise. An isolated central character divided against himself and devoted to the “imposition of silence” understood as a specifically artistic feat, a figure “partly artist,” partly misogynist, and almost wholly self-absorbed, a deliberately rudimentary “plot” hardly deserving of the word—such features appear again and again in his work. But “Assumption” does not prefigure this later work by any unmistakable sign. It is in every way a young man's story, a young artist's story, a young intellectual's story, brimming with suffering and apotheosis and determinedly transcendent sexuality.

MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS

Beckett published two stories and one “prose fragment” in 1932. The latter and one of the former are extracts from the unfinished, never published novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the other story is an early version of “Dante and the Lobster,” which in 1934 would open his first collection of stories, More Pricks than Kicks. “Dante and the Lobster” was followed there by nine others, connected each to the other in several ways. All share, for example, their central character, one Belacqua Shuah, who gets his surname from the Bible and his cognomen from Dante's Purgatorio, and their physical setting, Dublin and environs. Temporally, they are arranged in sequence, leading from the death of a lobster to the death of the hero, with many deaths in between. Tonally, they are united by a highly self-conscious, allusive style—arch, aggressive, comic.

The stories are mostly comic, in a manner that begins to seem recognizably the author's. “He was telling a funny story about a fiasco” says the narrator of a later story, but the reference to the stories of More Pricks than Kicks is precise.² They are stories about fiascos—deaths and dismemberments are everywhere in them—and they are very funny. Things begin promptly in “Dante and the Lobster” with the hero, Belacqua, “bogged” in his reading of the opening cantos of the Paradiso.³ Specifically, he cannot follow Beatrice's explanation of moon spots to Dante the pilgrim, and his efforts to do so bear so little fruit that noon, with its call to other duties, comes to him as a relief from this “quodlibet” (a philosophical or theological disputation).

Three obligations organize the remainder of Belacqua's day: “First lunch, then the lobster, then the Italian lesson” (MPTK, [More Pricks than Kicks] 10). Lunch, first in line, is presented as a delicate affair, fraught with perils. Many things can go wrong, and if they do, “he might just as well not eat at all, for the food would turn to bitterness on his palate” (MPTK, 10). In the first place, he must not be disturbed by any “brisk tattler” bearing either “a big idea or a petition” (MPTK, 10); in the second place the bread for his sandwich must be properly toasted, for if there was “one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a bathos of pith and dough” (MPTK, 11); and in the third place the cheese for the sandwich, to be called for on the way to the “lowly public where he was expected, in the sense that the entry of his grotesque person would provoke no comment or laughter” (MPTK, 15), must be not just any cheese but “a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese” (MPTK, 14).

But in the matter of lunch, unlike the matter of Dante's moon spots, Belacqua is successful. He avoids disastrous encounters, with their accompanying “conversational nuisance” (MPTK, 13), and the sandwich, cheese, toast, and appropriate spices, no butter, is perfection itself: “his teeth and jaws had been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the exploit.” The lunch, obligation number one, is such a success that “it would abide as a standard in his mind” (MPTK, 17). He moves on to obligation number two, the lobster, where other dangers threaten. His “lousy old bitch of an aunt” may not have placed her order in time; the fishmonger may delay him by failing to have the lobster ready. “God damn these tradesmen,” Belacqua thinks, “you can never rely on them” (MPTK, 16).

But here, again, he is pleasantly surprised—“The lobster was ready after all, the man handed it over instanter”—and he proceeds to obligation number three, the Italian lesson, “quite happy, for all had gone swimmingly” (MPTK 17). Of this obligation he has no fears, only eager anticipations. His teacher, Signorina Adriana Ottolenghi, is “so charming and remarkable” that Belacqua has “set her on a pedestal in his mind, apart from other women” (MPTK, 16). He is eager to impress her, to “frame a shining phrase” (MPTK, 16) in Italian for her, to don “an expression of profundity” in responding to her suggestion that he “might do worse than make up Dante's rare movements of compassion in Hell” (MPTK, 19). But these gestures, one begins to notice, are superficial, mere phrases and expressions, far from the heart of the matter, which has to do with “movements of compassion.” For in fact Belacqua responds to the Ottolenghi's suggestion with an incomprehension only exacerbated by his “expression of profundity,” quoting what he calls a “superb pun” from the Inferno's twentieth canto: “qui vive la pieta quando e ben morta” (here pity/piety lives when it is thoroughly/better dead). This gem, of course, has no relation whatever to any of “Dante's rare movements of compassion in hell.” Belacqua, busy with his phrases and expressions, preening in the rigged mirror of his mind, has clearly not heard the Ottolenghi. She has tried to teach him, even to teach him more than Italian, but without success, as her response to his citation makes clear:

She said nothing.

“Is it not a great phrase?” he gushed.

She said nothing.

“Now” he said like a fool “I wonder how you could translate that?”

Still she said nothing.

(MPTK, 19)

But Belacqua, poor student, is not the Ottolenghi's only auditor, fortunately, since her suggestion is preserved in Beckett's story, and, in fact, broaches that story's major theme. Readers, here as so often in fiction, drama, and poetry, have the opportunity to be superior to the hero. In the story's title, Dante shares top billing with a lobster, already introduced as delivered fresh and on time to the happy Belacqua on his way from lunch to lesson. In the story's final episode, Belacqua brings the lobster to his aunt, only to be shocked to learn that it is still alive and that lobsters are customarily so when cooked. “Have sense,” says his no-nonsense aunt, “lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be” (MPTK, 22).

The title now makes sense, and the Ottolenghi's lesson deepens. From Dante's moon spots to the lobster in the pot, from the story's beginning to the story's end, the message is the same. The moon with its spots was Cain, “seared with the first stigma of God's pity, that an outcast might not die quickly” (MPTK, 12). The lobster does not die quickly either. Belacqua, seeing it “exposed cruciform on the oilcloth” in preparation for the boiling water, consoles himself: “Well, … it's a quick death, God help us all.” This easy shuffle, however, equally available to all eager to distance themselves from the suffering of others, is emphatically rejected in the story's last, stark line: “It is not” (MPTK, 22).

A quick death—its desirability is a hoary theme, found in Sophocles. Beckett will make its unavailability a cornerstone of his work. In Waiting for Godot, for example, Estragon appalls fellow tramp Vladimir by judging his own misfortunes as greater than Christ's. Not only did the latter live in a warm, dry climate, but in that climate “they crucified quick.”⁴ This advantage is not available in “Dante and the Lobster,” not to Cain, not to the lobster, not to the condemned murderer McCabe, the rejection of whose petition for mercy was news that “further spiced” (MPTK, 17) Belacqua's lunch, and not to Signorina Adriana Ottolenghi, either, whose final line in the story is a bitter, deep response to Belacqua's casual question, following an interruption:

“Where were we?” said Belacqua

But Neapolitan patience has its limits.

“Where are we ever?” cried the Ottolenghi “where we were, as we were.”

(MPTK, 20)

Where we are, ever, in this story, and in the world Beckett will establish with increasing authority from here on out, is a purgatory verging on hell, a place of more pricks than kicks. This, then, is the basic situation, the given, a world chock-full of suffering and decline, slow decline. When Belacqua returns home to his aunt, she is busy in the garden, “tending whatever flowers die at that time of year” (MPTK, 21). She embraces him, and “together they went down into the bowels of the earth, into the kitchen in the basement” (MPTK, 21). This is not especially oblique. Even the bread used in preparation of Belacqua's lunch at the beginning of the story is subjected to a slow death. Before toasting, the bread is “spongy and warm, alive.” Knowing that toasting “must not on any account be done too rapidly,” lest “you only charred the outside and left the pith as sodden as before” (MPTK, 11), Belacqua lowers the flame and by his patience produces the desired result, “done to a dead end, black and smoking” (MPTK, 12).

In such a world, and to its denizens, various attitudes are possible. The Ottolenghi, against the grain, counsels compassion, and her student, though he misses the lesson, is provoked to introspection by her despairing cry. On his homeward walk, he ponders her words: “Where we were … Why not pity and piety both, even down below? Why not mercy and Godliness together? A little mercy in the stress of sacrifice, a little mercy to rejoice against judgment” (MPTK, 21). But Belacqua is not ready for such wisdom. Here, as in other stories, he is the receiver of compassion, not the giver, and his aunt is right to scorn his squeamishness. “You make a fuss,” she says, “and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner” (MPTK, 22). No, the “shining phrase” and the “expression of profundity” are the summits of Belacqua's attainment. The shining action, profundity itself, the true phrase that does not shine—these come (when they come) from others, from the Ottolenghi or the aunt, who appears to provide for Belacqua even as she apparently receives poor gratitude from her nephew, or even from the tradesman (whose “little family grocery” [MPTK, 13] supplies Belacqua with his Gorgonzola) who “felt sympathy and pity for this queer customer who always looked ill and dejected” (MPTK, 15).

Other stories follow a similar pattern. In “Fingal,” the second story, Belacqua concludes a country excursion by abandoning his girlfriend of the moment, Winnie Coates, and fleeing to a pub on a stolen bicycle. The story is memorable for the bicycle, since bicycles fascinate many of Beckett's protagonists, for its introduction of the Portrane Lunatic Asylum as part of the landscape (Belacqua, as he points it out, tells Winnie his heart lives there) since asylums and their inmates reappear even more often than bicycles, and perhaps most of all for one moment between Winnie and Belacqua when she extends to him a compassion that, being unearned, must come as a kind of secular grace.

Learning that a rash on his face is in fact impetigo, Winnie is angered that he has nevertheless kissed her. He offers the excuse of passion, recognizing it as lame:

“I forgot” he said. “I get so excited you know.”

She spittled on her handkerchief and wiped her mouth. Belacqua lay humbly beside her, expecting her to get up and leave him. But instead she said:

“What is it anyway? What does it come from?”

“Dirt” said Belacqua, “you see it on slum children.”

A long awkward silence followed these words.

“Don't pick it darling” she said unexpectedly at last, “you'll make it worse.”

This came to Belacqua like a drink of water to drink in a dungeon. Her goodwill must have meant something to him.

(MPTK, 24-25)

It did mean something, perhaps, but not enough to keep him from abandoning Winnie later when the bicycle beckoned.

“Ding-Dong,” the collection's third story, features a first-person narrator who identifies himself as Belacqua's former close friend. Following an opening disquisition on Belacqua's devotion to peripeteia—“He was pleased to think that he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion” (MPTK, 36)—the story is told of an evening made memorable by his purchase, while seated in a pub, of four seats in heaven from “a woman of very remarkable presence” (MPTK, 44). This strange event seems consciously to echo The Tempest, whence comes also the title, perhaps, from Ariel's song, with Belacqua as the charmed Ferdinand. Certainly the story's close, in which Belacqua “tarried a little to listen to the music” (MPTK, 46), encourages the parallel. “Ding-Dong” seems a lighter, even a warmer story than its two predecessors, though here, too, there are crucifixions both fast and slow. Among these are the “trituration” (MPTK, 43) of a little girl by a bus and the evening departure of “the blind paralytic who sat all day” (MPTK, 39) in his wheelchair, begging alms with the aid of a “placard announcing his distress” (MPTK, 40). But the story ends with the woman of “remarkable presence,” her countenance “full of light” and bearing “no trace of suffering.” From others she had “met with more rebuffs than pence” (MPTK, 44), but Belacqua for once responds positively. Perhaps it is significant, too, that his self-centeredness, here called “Ego Maximus, little me” (MPTK, 39), is so far moderated that his purchases are on behalf of others—friend, father, mother, mistress—rather than for himself.

“A Wet Night,” next in the collection and one of two salvaged more or less directly from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is one of the volume's longest (only “What a Misfortune” is comparable). Its central event is a holiday party, “claret cup and intelligentsia,” attended by, among others, Belacqua, late and in sad disrepair, and, arriving earlier, his “current one and only” (MPTK, 51), Alba Perdue. The party gathers under one roof a diverse collection of Dublin's poseurs and failures, and all—except the Alba, queen of this and any likely ball—are treated with the narrator's contempt. The hostess, for example, Caleken Frica, first described as a “throttled gazelle,” possesses a face “beyond appeal, a flagrant seat of injury,” and resembles at last nothing so much as a “martyress in rut” (MPTK, 61). Her party, attended by many in the hope of free eats and drinks, and these are disappointed by the meagre spread, soon degenerates into a “sinister kiss-me-Charley hugger-mugger” that “spread like wildfire throughout the building, till it raged from attic to basement” (MPTK, 76). Alba, however, holds herself apart from all this.

Meanwhile, Belacqua, moving unsteadily from pub to party in a bitter rain, suddenly feels “white and clammy” (MPTK, 70) and leans against a wall. Soon he is accosted by a policeman, only to embarrass himself and anger the lawman by throwing up, “with undemonstrative abundance, all over the boots and trouser-ends of the Guard,” who promptly knocks him down “into the outskirts of his own offal” (MPTK, 71). Beckett, in passages like this, is finding his voice.

At last Belacqua reaches the party, where “the Alba thought she had never seen anybody, man or woman, look quite such a sovereign booby” (MPTK, 78). This is saying something, given the present company, but it does not stop her next movement, any more than his impetigo had earlier stopped Winnie's:

In an unsubduable movement of misericord the Alba started out of her chair.

“Nino” she called, without shame or ceremony.

The distant call came to Belacqua like a pint of Perrier to drink in a dungeon.

(MPTK, 78)

“A Wet Night,” as several critics have pointed out, is on one level an obvious parody of Joyce's famous Dubliners story “The Dead,” which it echoes in both structure and detail. But the reference—this is important—is not so much a gesture of homage as a comic declaration of independence. The new man, it says, will be doing things differently. Consider the most obvious instance, the echo of Joyce's famous closing description of the “softly falling” snow that is “general all over Ireland,” falling “faintly through the universe … like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”⁵ “A Wet Night” features rain instead, and it falls not softly but with “a rather desolate uniformity,” and not upon the whole universe of the quick and dead but “upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably upon the Central Bog” (MPTK, 83). What is more, as if the cool, almost meteorological note introduced by “littoral,” “uniformity,” and “notably” did not sufficiently undercut the lyricism of the original, Beckett makes sure to deprive the passage of the dignity conferred by closure. The last word is given, instead, to Belacqua's early morning departure from the Alba's home, a less than dignified exit in which he throws away his boots—years later, in Waiting for Godot, Estragon will also struggle with boots—and is for the second time ordered to move on by a policeman.

“A Wet Night” is notable also for its praise of silence, given as a clinching general question following a relentless savaging, complete with instances of awful conversation, of the Frica's party. “Who shall silence them, at last?” the narrator wants to know; “Who shall circumcise their lips from speaking, at last?” (MPTK, 79). Good question, and Beckett has made it his own, has made it of himself, in a tone hovering exactly between assertion and despair.

“Love and Lethe,” story number five, is built like “Ding-Dong” on a foolish act that ends in music. Belacqua and yet another lady in his life, this one named Ruby Tough (she is mentioned before her time, in violation of all the norms of sequence and without the slightest apology, in “A Wet Night”), agree to a dual suicide and make careful plans. In this purpose, of course, Belacqua is the instigator, and he “cultivated Ruby” as he cultivates the others, as one cultivates a garden for its calories, “for the part she was to play on his behalf” (MPTK, 89). But he is richly supplied with reasons; Belacqua lacks many things but reasons he has aplenty—in this instance “Greek and Roman reasons, Sturm und Drang reasons, reasons metaphysical, aesthetic, erotic, anterotic and chemical, Empedocles of Agrigentum and John of the Cross reasons” (MPTK, 90). All of these are false, but Ruby, “flattened by this torrent of incentive” (MPTK, 90), agrees anyway, secure in her possession of “an incurable disorder” (MPTK, 89) and sensing in Belacqua's silly plan “a chance to end with a fairly beautiful bang” (MPTK, 90).

But the plan goes awry, as plans do, especially plans on these pages. The “swagger sports roadster, chartered at untold gold by the hour” (MPTK, 90), the aged whiskey purchased “on tick” (MPTK, 96), the revolver, ammunition, and poison, all these are squandered to rather more usual ends when “the revolver went off, harmlessly luckily, and the bullet fell in terram nobody knows where” (MPTK, 99). Instead of dying gloriously under the motto “TEMPORARILY SANE” (MPTK, 97) lettered on an old license plate, the would-be self-slaughterers “came together in inevitable nuptial” as the delicate narrator moves “away on tiptoe” (MPTK, 99), ending his story in benediction: “May their night be full of music at all events” (MPTK, 100). This same narrator recurs more frequently than his predecessors to direct asides, if such things are possible, to the reader. Sometimes these provide helpful information: “Reader, a rosiner is a drop of the hard” (MPTK, 86), or, “Reader, a gloria is coffee laced with brandy” (MPTK, 87). Sometimes they urge the adequacy of explanations already tendered to the needs of “even the most captious reader” (MPTK, 89).

Story number six, “Walking Out,” is most memorable for the tramp already extolled, the “real man at last” whose gentle “smile proof against all adversity” (MPTK, 104) so abashes the “wretched bourgeois” (MPTK, 103) Belacqua. But this is mere interlude in a rush of events “One fateful fine Spring evening” (MPTK, 101) that leave that paltry hero beaten and his latest girl Lucy crippled. The beating, a “brutal verberation” (MPTK, 113) richly deserved, is administered by an “infuriated Tanzherr” (MPTK, 112) on behalf of himself and his “pretty little German girl” (MPTK, 109). The walk of the title is at least in part a voyeur's reconnaissance; Belacqua, as Lucy's “horrible diagnosis” (MPTK, 109) has only just this same evening made clear, is a “creepy-crawly” (MPTK, 108), a “trite spite of the vilest description.” The crippling, undeserved, is administered by “a superb silent limousine, a Daimler no doubt, driven by a drunken lord” (MPTK, 110), which runs down Lucy, a devoted equestrienne, and her “magnificent jennet” (MPTK, 104), as she rides, her mind a court for “cruel battledore” (MPTK, 110) between the image of the old Belacqua, loved, and the new, despicable, to the place of their scheduled rendezvous.

Neither arrives, Lucy because of the lord in his Daimler, Belacqua because of the “brutal verberation” of the Tanzherr. But the ending, at least of this story, is all Pippa Passes and Pangloss, since “now he is happily married to Lucy and the question of cicisbei does not arise” (MPTK, 113). The question had arisen earlier only at Belacqua's insistence—he had urged her to infidelity on his behalf, even prior to matrimony, just as he had earlier urged Ruby to share his suicide. He knows no other behalf, it seems. These recondite terms, rare even in dictionaries, culled from Latin, Italian, German, “battledore” (Oriental game, source of badminton), “verberation” (lashing with a rod or stick), “cicisbi” (lovers of a married woman or women) and the like—do not worry, reader, they will soon abate.

“What a Misfortune,” announcing Lucy's death in its first paragraph, speedily introduces another love (the term is used loosely, as is customary), Thelma bboggs. She is the fifth, after Winnie, Alba, Ruby, and Lucy (the Ottolenghi does not count). Thelma and Belacqua also marry; the preparations for this event occupy the greater part of the story. The parents of the bride, Mr. and Mrs. Otto Olaf bboggs, her sister, Una, “for whom an ape had already been set aside in hell: (MPTK, 118), the lover of the bride's mother, Walter Draffin, the groom's best man, Capper Quin, known as Hairy on account of his baldness, the remainder of the groom's entourage, two “deadbeats” (MPTK, 128) named Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, “an aged cretin,” and Hermione Nautzsche, “a powerfully built nymphomaniac” (MPTK, 138)—all these and still more make up the cast of this funniest (and, with “A Wet Night,” the longest) story in this funny collection.

And also it's most horrifying—the gentle humor of “Ding-Dong” and “Love and Lethe” are replaced here with something much more harsh. The “misfortune” of the title refers, among other things, to the story's central event, a wedding. To Belacqua, at the moment of falsehood (he is marrying Thelma for her “promissory wad” [MPTK, 116]), the church itself is a “cruciform cage, the bulldogs of heaven holding the chancel, the procession about to give tongue in the porch, the transepts cul de sac” (MPTK, 138). Except for “Dear Otto Olaf” (MPTK, 123), whose gratitude to Walter Draffin for years of service earns him the narrator's respect and sympathy, the story's major characters come in for scathing contempt. Here, for example, is Una, Thelma's older sister: “Think of holy Juliana of Norwich, to her aspect add a dash of souring, to her tissue half a hundredweight of adipose, abstract the charity and prayers, spray in vain with opopanax and assafoetida, and behold a radiant Una” (MPTK, 121). Disaster reigns, from large event to small. Thelma dies on her honeymoon, and a nameless car park attendant sustains a broken arm attempting to assist Capper Quin with the borrowed honeymoon car. Alba Perdue, not seen since “A Wet Night,” is enlisted as a bridesmaid—an act of deliberate cruelty protested only by Otto Olaf and compounded by her subsequent pairing with Draffin. This is, indeed, a funny, sad story about a fiasco, and this yoking begins to seem increasingly central to Beckett's design. This story, more than the others, begins to resemble the deceptive offering of Prometheus, in Hesiod's Theogony, where bare bones are concealed beneath an alluring surface of choice cuts. Under its lavish and exaggerated language, “What a Misfortune,” in grotesque characters like Skyrm and Nautzsche, for example, begins to offer that scorched and diminished earth later made famous in Godot and Endgame. The title, an allusion to Voltaire, is a phrase much loved by the author—he had used it before, in Italian, in a poem, and would use it later, in French, in Malone Dies.⁶

The next story, number eight, “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux,” is the volume's least impressive and its briefest. It came, like “A Wet Night,” from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and before that apparently from a personal letter, the use of which was reportedly resented by the sender's family. (There exists, unfortunately, a biography of Beckett whose author meant the subject no good; she discusses this matter in a shocked, eager tone and in highly speculative detail, asserting, for example, the “verbatim” use of a letter not itself cited.⁷ But this sort of thing can only increase one's sympathy for the Tanzherr of “Walking Out.” Certainly no one should be encouraged to read the letter—or “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux,” for that matter.) It is, as the title suggests, a letter, addressed to Belacqua and written in a mad misspelled sludge of English and German, rich in exclamation, capitalization, and other excesses. The content is simple: the Smeraldina describes her activities and her loneliness, recommends films, and tells Belacqua repeatedly and insistently that she craves his body. Bad news, this, to the Belacqua who considered the crippled Lucy a perfect mate, but prior to her injury considered her so dangerous that he repeatedly urged her to “establish their married life” on what he called the “solid basis” (MPTK, 103) of cuckoldry. A similar attitude is one of Otto Olaf's wisdoms, too, in “What a Misfortune.” Olaf's horns “sat easily upon him,” and he feels nothing but gratitude to Walter Draffin: “Any man who saved him trouble, as Walter had for so many years, could rely on his esteem” (MPTK, 120). For a man like Belacqua, the Smeraldina is far too robust, and surely he regarded himself fortunate to have her in Germany, where space could serve the present as injury had served the past.

The two final stories, “Yellow” and “Draff,” deal, respectively, with Belacqua's death and burial. The death is by medical misadventure and follows immediately upon the physician's confident self-evaluation, while the burial is by none other than the Smeraldina, now Mrs. Shuah number three, assisted by none other than Capper Quin, the best man of “What a Misfortune,” now reduced to successor, after the manner of Walter Draffin.

“Yellow” is devoted mostly to Belacqua's hospital meditations, his search for mental equipoise in a time of stress. He is in for operations on nape and toe, amputations both, and he is frightened: “At twelve sharp he would be sliced open—zeep!—with a bistoury. This was the idea his mind for the moment was in no fit state to entertain” (MPTK, 159). In his distress, a paradox from Donne, heaven-sent, reminds him at once of Heraclitus and Democritus, and these in turn provide him with two potential aids. “Was it to be laughter or tears?” (MPTK, 163) he asks, and at last he chooses the former, reasoning that the latter would be more open to misinterpretation, ascribed not to a considered philosophical position but “rather to the tumour the size of a brick that he had on the back of his neck” (MPTK, 164).

This choice once made, even undermined as it is by second thoughts, “the idea” can be confronted successfully. When Belacqua, like the lobster of the opening story, has only seconds to live, he is at his best: he “swaggered through the antechamber” and “bounced up on the table like a bridegroom” (MPTK, 174). An ominous simile, this last, in Mr. Beckett's emerging world. We know by now what happens, and soon, to brides and grooms. It is only part, though a vivid part, of a larger lesson on well-laid plans. Plan to die, says “Love and Lethe,” and end up with “inevitable nuptial” (MPTK, 99); plan a nuptial and end up dead.

“Draff” concentrates its attention not on Belacqua, who begins the story laid out with a Bible under his chin and ends it laid in a grave “upholstered” with bracken and fern, “all lush, green and most sweet smelling” (MPTK, 182), but on his widow, the Smeraldina, who has lost all trace of the German accents so pronounced in “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux.” Things end as they began, with references to Dante prominent, though a definite turn for the worse is indicated by their tenor. Where “Dante and the Lobster” opened with Belacqua “stuck in the first of the canti in the moon” (MPTK, 9), that is, however stuck, in Paradise, “Draff” has his corpse first measured and dressed by a Mr. Malacoda and later conveyed to its resting ground by a driver named Scarmiglione.

But here, as in Dante, commedia prevails. The Smeraldina soon has Capper Quin in tow, Belacqua himself is laid to rest in the “loveliest little lap of earth you ever saw” (MPTK, 182), and the cemetery groundskeeper, who gets the book's last scene, is contented: “He sang a little song, he drank his bottle of stout, he dashed away a tear, he made himself comfortable” (MPTK, 191). Even Belacqua's house, which is set ablaze by the gardener during his funeral, turns out to be insured. An obnoxious Parson is abandoned on the road after the burial, evicted from the car by Quin, and the servant Mary Ann is raped by the pyromaniac gardener, but these are small matters, that are given short shrift in the story's economy. “Little remains to be told,” says the narrator, moving to wrap things up: “On their return they found the house in flames, the home to which Belacqua had brought three brides a raging furnace. It transpired that during their absence something had snapped in the brain of the gardener, who had ravished the servant girl and then set the premises on fire” (MPTK, 189).

It is, of course, a part of the story's harsh comedy to undercut such melodrama by so offhanded an introduction, presenting it as the draff of “Draff.” (“Draff” is dregs, slop for hogs, lees, what is left of malt after brewing, garbage.) The reader, shocked by a narrator not so much unreliable, though he is that, as unfeeling, may think back to other matters judged too “little” to be told at all. What happens, for example, to the aunt who provided shelter and dinner in “Dante and the Lobster”? Or to the Ottolenghi? Or to Alba Perdue, perhaps aptly named, who after disappearing with Walter Draffin in “What a Misfortune,” is mentioned briefly as dead “in the natural course of being seen home” (MPTK, 175) at the beginning of “Draff”? This closing story is also notable for the volume's most savage image, a description of the Smeraldina and Quin embracing in shared grief, meeting for the first time after Belacqua's death. They embrace to console, widow and exbest man, but also in self interest, Wife of Bath to Jenkin, and the narrator seems to view this development with extreme distaste: “Capper Quin arrived on tiptire, in a car of his very own. He grappled with the widow, he simply could not help it. She was a sensible girl in some ways, she was not ashamed to let herself go in the arms of a man of her own weight at last. They broke away, carrot plucked from tin of grease” (MPTK, 179-80). Amidst his many bows to Dante, Beckett includes more than one nod to Swift's darker muse.

More Pricks than Kicks, oscillating between such varying shades, from a gentle humor praised in one review as “the profound risolino that does not destroy”⁸ to the harsher genres characterized in Watt as “modes of ululation,”⁹ offers two basic challenges to readers. The first is superficial, having to do with the volume's recondite, multilingual vocabulary, the youthful author wearing his learning like a sash of medals, and requires only a bank of dictionaries for its solution. (A branch of this challenge, even less important than the main trunk, has to do with the thick, if not rich, allusiveness of the young man's exuberant prose. If you have read “The Dead,” recognize the Beresina as a Byelorussian river and Dr. Petrie as Flinders, archaeologist and Egyptologist, and/or can boast familiarity with the landmarks of Dublin and environs—you may applaud yourself. If you have not, do not worry. Little is lost, in your reading of these stories, and their teller, finding his own voice, his own world, will soon lighten the allusive and referential load.)

The second challenge, anyway, is more worth one's time, as it gets to the heart of not only these but later, better stories. It has to do with tone, with that tightrope along pain and pleasure, tragedy and comedy, pricks and kicks, which is even here Beckett's special métier. Already present, for instance, at the extreme of distance and frigid authority, is that impersonal voice out of the heavens, speaking in fiat and inquisition, that in the beginning rejects Belacqua's sorry bromide on the lobster's death and in the end gives similar brief shrift to his anticipated posthumous encounter with “the girls, Lucy especially, hallowed and transfigured beyond the veil. What a hope!” sneers the voice, “Death had already cured him of that naivete” (MPTK, 181). Subsequent works will further embody this imperious otherness—it acquires female gender in Eh Joe and even shifts from speaking to listening in Not I.

Slightly more personal but no less authoritative is the voice occasionally heard in direct address to the reader in mockery of storytelling's conventions, as, for example, in the instances already cited from “Love and Lethe,” or this, from “Dante and the Lobster”: “Let us call it Winter, that dusk may fall now and a moon rise” (MPTK, 20). This is also the voice of the mock-helpful, mock-learned footnotes, five in number. Finally, as noted and emphasized here by way of compensation for usual neglect, there is the very occasional voice of open and undisguised affirmation, as in the sketch of the tinker in “Walking Out.”

Hearing these voices, learning to discount them, when and by how much, learning, too, to notice the omitted voice, the discarded character, the unstated conclusion and unspoken judgment—these are the skills to cultivate when exploring Beckett's stories. For the considerable armamentarium deployed so ostentatiously and aggressively in More Pricks than Kicks is radically curtailed in its successors. Before those successors, however, with their very different delights, there is one last early story to consider.

“A CASE IN A THOUSAND”

“A Case in a Thousand” appeared in the August 1934 issue of The Bookman and has never been reprinted. Like the earlier “Assumption,” it moves through a series of mostly unhappy events to an obliquely triumphant conclusion. A young doctor named Nye, identified at the beginning as “one of the sad men,” is summoned for consultation by a surgeon colleague named Bor. The patient, after Bor had “operated with the utmost success,” had exhibited “an unfathomable tendency to sink.”¹⁰ But here is the complication, a coincidence: the patient, a boy named Bray, is the son of Nye's “old nurse,” a woman “whom as a baby and small boy he had adored” (242). And in this old relationship there was a moment that still lives, the memory of which stirs “shame” in Mrs. Bray and makes Dr. Nye's initial recognition something to be “feared” (242). A later story, “The Expelled,” refers in passing to a similar situation: “He gave me a woman's name that I've forgotten. Perhaps she had dandled me on her knees while I was still in swaddling clothes and there had been some lovey-dovey. Sometimes that suffices” (STN [Stories and Texts for Nothing], 19). But this very likely has little bearing, if any, on Mrs. Bray and Dr. Nye.

The events of the present are no better. Bor will operate again only at Nye's urging, and “from the strictly pathological point of view there was as much to be urged on the one side as there was on the other” (242). Nye, therefore, is “outside the scope of his science” but obliged nonetheless to reach a decision. His procedure in this difficult situation is described at some length: “He took hold of the boy's wrist, stretched himself all along the edge of the bed and entered the kind of therapeutic trance that he reserved for such happily rare dilemmas” (242). His expression at this time, “at once aghast and rapt,” is witnessed by Mrs. Bray and triggers her recollection of their previous intimacy. The “trance” results in a decision to operate again, but young Bray's lung collapses and he dies. The mother, who has watched at her son's bedside (and outside the hospital in the intervals between visiting hours) throughout his illness, offers Dr. Nye her thanks, but despite “great efforts to speak their minds,” they can share only “silence.” Nye then leaves for “a short holiday at the seaside” (242).

He is soon called back, however, by a note from Bor, who tells him Mrs. Bray is back at her stand, maintaining the same vigil she had earlier mounted on behalf of her son. He goes to see her and at last broaches the subject that matters: “There's something I've been wanting to ask you.” She answers, “I wonder would that be the same thing I've been wanting to tell you ever since that time you stretched out on his bed.” (242). It is, of course, and when he replies only by asking if she can “go on,” that bedrock question, she relates “a matter connected with his earliest years, so trivial and intimate that it need not be enlarged on here, but from the elucidation of which Dr. Nye, that sad man, expected great things” (242). Unlike Nye, we do not learn what the matter is, but we do know what we need to know: that Mrs. Bray and Dr. Nye, by their persistence and courage, quite outside the scope of his science or any science, have earned their communion. The patient dies, and the doctor is cured. “Thank you very much” he says when Mrs. Bray finishes, “that was what I was wondering” (242). It is a case in a thousand, take that either way—that it is just one case of a thousand equally compelling, emphasizing its universality, or that it is a rare and unique occurrence, emphasizing its rarity, like what happened to Hamlet or Oedipus. Or take it both ways, as intended, no doubt.

Critics have mostly ignored this story, and such comment as it has elicited has focused on its possible sources in Beckett's relationship with his analyst and/or his mother.¹¹ This is lamentable, since “A Case in a Thousand” presents its muted personae, Dr. Nye and Mrs. Bray, in a style at great remove from the “white voice” (MPTK, 148) and “shining phrase” (MPTK, 16) of Belacqua. Silence, as a voice in Beckett's writing, is ascending its footstool. In his sympathy with such creatures, with their tendency to stasis and vigil, their stammering difficulty in the attempt to “speak their minds” (242), he is finding a way to speak his own mind, or perhaps merely to speak.

In the big world, however, as the 1930s end and the fledgling author gets his first novel published (Murphy, in 1938), a war is coming on. Beckett's life will be spared, but it will be a near miss. Close friends will perish. He will find it necessary to flee his home. All this will affect his work much as the soft bread in “Dante and the Lobster” is changed at Belacqua's hand: “But he would very soon take that plush feel off it, by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face” (MPTK, 11). Beckett's next short fictions, four stories written in 1945 and 1946, are harrowed and muted far beyond anything envisioned in More Pricks than Kicks and give a “fat white look,” indeed, to their prewar predecessors. “A Case in a Thousand” is a step, a modest step, in that direction.

Notes

1. “Assumption,” transition 16-17 (1929): 268; hereafter cited in the text.

2. “The Calmative,” in Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 29; hereafter cited in the text as STN.

3. More Pricks than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 9; hereafter cited in the text as MPTK.

4. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 34b; hereafter cited in the text as G.

5. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1976), 223.

6. The poem is “Che Sciagura,” a juvenile effort first published in T.C.D., a Trinity College weekly, in 1929. Malone, in the French original of Malone Dies, says “quel malheur” [what a misfortune] when he loses his stick. The phrase closes the eleventh chapter of Candide, spoken by the Eunuch before the naked Cunegonde. “O che sciagura,” he says, “d'essere senza coglioni!” (What a shame to have no balls!).

7. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 146.

8. “An Imaginative Work!” review of The Amaranthers by Jack B. Yeats, Dublin Magazine 11 (1936): 80.

9. Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 48; hereafter cited in the text as W.

10. “A Case in a Thousand,” The Bookman 86 (1934): 241; hereafter cited in the text.

11. See, for example, Bair, Samuel Beckett, where an especially fuzzy sentence opens with the character Dr. Nye in the subject chair but substitutes the author Beckett at an indeterminate middle point to close in psychological rather than literary analysis: “Dr. Nye's fascination with Mrs. Bray as a mother-sweetheart, his longing for his childhood and the curious womblike evocation of the bizarre incident of the bed all seem to be clumsy attempts to integrate his real-life attitudes towards his mother with his fiction” (185).