Images of Beckett - Index of

148 NOTES TO PAGES 1–21
Notes
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT
1 Samuel Beckett [in future notes referring to diary entries
and letters, SB], unpublished German Diaries, vol. 2,
6 November 1936.
2 SB, German Diaries, vol. 3, 31 December 1936.
3 SB, letter to Ethna MacCarthy, 10 January 1959.
4 SB, letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 12 June 1972.
5 SB, letter to Mary Hutchinson, 24 August 1972.
6 SB, letter to Ruby Cohn, 6 February 1977.
7 SB, letter to Mary Hutchinson, 6 February 1977.
8 SB, letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 15 May 1977.
9 SB, letter to Larry Shainberg, 7 January 1983.
10 SB, letter to James Knowlson, 20 May 1981.
11 SB, letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 11 January 1981.
12 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges
Duthuit (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 11. Beckett
wrote these words in the 1931 first edition of Proust.
13 For example, Murphy in Beckett’s novel of that name
plays a game of chess against Mr Endon and Endgame, the
title of which itself derives from chess terminology, also
has elements that it shares with the game, for example,
Hamm’s opening ‘Me to play.’
14 In Patrick Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, PN Review 96, vol. 20,
no. 4, March–April 1994, p. 20, Bowles quotes Beckett as
saying ‘Hölderlin ended in something of this kind of
failure. His only successes are the points where his
poems go on, falter, stammer and then admit failure, and
are abandoned. At such points he was most successful.
When he tried to abandon the spurious magnificence.’
Beckett was particularly fond of Hölderlin’s ‘Der
Spaziergang’ and ‘Die Titanen’.
15 Samuel Beckett, undated conversation with James
Knowlson at dinner in the PLM hôtel, boulevard
Saint-Jacques, Paris.
16 Anne Atik, How It Was. A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London:
Faber & Faber, 2001).
17 Atik also spoke of how much Beckett admired Heine’s
poetry, ibid., p. 67.
18 Samuel Beckett, conversation with James Knowlson,
13 April 1983.
19 Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, p. 17.
20 All of these quotations are taken from Lawrence Harvey’s
notes on his conversations with Beckett on 7 November
1961, 22 February 1962 and 19 March 1962. The notes
are preserved at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
21 These extensive notes made by Beckett in the early 1930s
on his readings of histories of philosophy are now at
Trinity College, Dublin, with copies in the archive of the
Beckett International Foundation at the University of
Reading.
22 See Atik, How It Was, pp. 7–11.
23 SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 18 January 1937.
24 SB, letter to James Knowlson, 28 October 1976.
25 SB, letter to Tom Bishop, 20 March 1973.
26 MS 2901, archive of the Beckett International
Foundation, University of Reading.
27 In 1931 Beckett wrote to Tom MacGreevy: ‘I read two
books of Powys: Mark Only and Mr Tasker’s Gods not
knowing his work at all, and was very disappointed.
Such a fabricated darkness and painfully organised
unified tragic completeness. The Hardy sin caricatured.’
SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 8 November 1931.
28 See also Alain Badiou’s interesting discussion of this
and other positive features of Beckett’s writing in his
book, Beckett. L’increvable désir (Paris: Hachette, 1995).
29 Nancy Cunard described Beckett in 1956 as looking ‘like
a magnificent Mexican sculpture now’. Anne Chisholm,
Nancy Cunard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 400.
30 SB, letter to Alan Schneider, 15 July 1967.
31 SB, letter to Nick Rawson, 1 March 1970.
32 SB, letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 3 October 1966.
33 SB, letter to Judith Schmidt, 27 April 1965.
34 Samuel Beckett, ‘Draff’ in More Pricks than Kicks
(1st edition, London: Chatto & Windus, 1934; London:
Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 204. The quotation is used
twice in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and also in Watt.