Echo's Bones. Samuel Beckett

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      ECHO’S BONES

      WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

      Collected Poems in English and French

      The Collected Shorter Plays

      (All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . , A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)

      The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989

      (Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1–8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)

      Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

      Echo’s Bones

      Endgame and Act Without Words

      Ends and Odds

      First Love and Other Shorts

      Happy Days

      How It Is

      I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

      Krapps Last Tape: (All that Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)

      Mercier and Camier

      Molloy

      More Pricks than Kicks

      (Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)

      Murphy

      Nohow On

      (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho)

      The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett

      Rockaby and Other Short Plays

      (Rockaby, Ohio impromptu, All Strange Away, and A Piece of Monologue)

      The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett

      (boxed paperback set)

      Volume I: Novels

      (Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)

      Volume II: Novels

      (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is)Volume III: Dramatic Works

      Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism

      Stories and Texts for Nothing

      (The Expelled, the Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13)

      Three Novels

      (Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)

      Waiting for Godot

      Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition

      Watt

      Samuel Beckett

      ECHO’S BONES

      Edited by Mark Nixon

      Grove Press

      New York

      ‘Echo’s Bones’ © the Estate of Samuel Beckett 2014

      Commentary © 2014 by Mark Nixon

      Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods

      Jacket photograph ©BobAdelson

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

      First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

      Faber & Faber Ltd

      Printed in the United States of America

      ISBN 978-0-8021-2045-8

      eISBN 978-0-8021-9407-7

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.

      154 West 14th Street

      New York, NY 10011

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

       www.groveatlantic.com

      CONTENTS

       Acknowledgements

       Introduction

       Note on the Text

       Scan from Typescript

       ECHO’S BONES

       Annotations

       Letters from Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus to Samuel Beckett

       Bibliography

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      My first debt of gratitude is to Edward Beckett, who has supported this publication since its inception several years ago. I would also like to thank the Beckett International Foundation, as well as Special Collections at the University of Reading, the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin and Random House for giving relevant permissions. I have benefited from the help and expertise of a number of scholars in annotating ‘Echo’s Bones’. Unfortunately, I am un­able to pay proper and specific credit to any individual scholar to whom I am indebted for information, as this would have made the entries unwieldy, but wish to acknowledge my debt here. My greatest debt (not for the first, and undoubtedly not for the last time) is to John Pilling, who has grappled with this story for more years than I have, and has generously given me advice, hints and material along the way. He has helped me to clarify various difficult issues, and his annotated edition of Beckett’s Dream Notebook – the main source for material found in ‘Echo’s Bones’ – has made my task of annotating the text considerably easier. Further sources have been suggested or identified by Chris Ackerley, Aura Beckhöfer-Fialho, Tatyana Hramova, Dirk Van Hulle, Seán Kennedy, Marty Korwin-Pawlowski, the late Seán Lawlor, Paola Nasti, Matthew Scott and David Tucker, and I am grateful to all of them for their help in unravelling several riddles in the text. Thanks are also due to Jim Knowlson for his friendship and support. I am