Beckett in the "Wake"

7/27/2019 Beckett in the "Wake"

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University of Tulsa

Beckett in the "Wake"Author(s): Hugh B. StaplesSource: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, Beckett Issue (Summer, 1971), pp. 421-424Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486933 .

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Hugh B. Staples

Beckett in the WakeIn an article published some time back in AWN,1 Nathan

Halper raps my knuckles for quoting a story Ellmann heard fromBeckett concerning Joyce's authorial method. The ancedote appearsin the Ellmann biography thus:

Once or twice he dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake toBeckett, though dictation did not work very well for him; inthe middle of some such session there was a knock at the doorwhich Beckett didn't hear. Joyce said, 'Come in,' and Beckettwrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had writtenand Joyce said, 'What's that "Come in"? 'Yes, you said that,'said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, 'Let itstand.' He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and thwarted by Joyce'ssingular method.2

Halper points out, quite rightly, that the phrase 'Come in' doesnot seem to appear in FW in a way that would seems relevant inthe context (the phrase should be imperative), or to be found inpassages for which Beckett would have been a possible amanuensis.The most likely sequence would have been 'The Mime of MickNick and the Maggies' (FW II, i), which, according to both Hayman and Ellmann, occupied a good deal of Joyce's energies betweenabout 1930 and 1934. Halper is right in saying that the phrase 'Comein' does not appear in this section, but I think that evidence for thevalidity of the anecdote nonetheless lies embedded in an early paragraph of the 'Mime.' It is (FW 222.32-36; 223.1-11):

Aminxt that nombre of evelings, but how pierceful in theirsojestiveness were those first girly stirs, with zitterings of flightreleased and twinglings of twitchbells in rondel after, with

waverings that made shimmershake rather naightily all theduskcended airs and shylit beaconings from shebehind himsback. Sammy, call on. Mirrylamb, she was shuffering all the

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422 Hugh B. Staplesdiseasinesses of the unherd of. Mary Louisan Shousapinas! IfArck could no more salve his agnols from the wiles of willywooly wolf! If all the airish signics of her dipandump helpabitfrom an Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons could not thatGlugg to catch her by the calour of her brideness! Not Rose,Sevilla nor Citronelle; not Esmeralde, Pervinca nor Indra; notViola even nor all of them four themes over. But, the monthagestick in the melmelode jawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing.Up tighty in the front, down again on the loose, drim anddrumming on her back and a pop from her whistle. What isthat, O holytroopers? Isot givin yoe?3

My conjecture is that as Joyce was dictating to Beckett, there wasa noise in the background, possibly someone knocking at the door

?more likely some other loud noise of the kind to which Joyce wasespecially sensitive. The sound may or may not have been remarkedby Beckett, who would in any event have been concentrating oncatching The Master's ipsissima verba, and thus would have beencarried along by his own momentum to record Joyce's inadvertentverbal reaction. Here the evidence in Hayman's A First-Draft is, Ithink, instructive. The relevant passage in his transcription of MS47477, 6 is:

But up tightly in the front, down again in the loose, drim anddrumming on her back and a pop from her whistle what's that.O holytroopers?4

Note how the phrase 'what's that' appears completely unseparated from the preceding line, though the line as a whole isdivided into syntactical units by commas. Note also that it is notfollowed by a question mark, as the sense demands. I suggest thatthe dictation stopped abruptly; the mysterious noise was explained.(Probably it was not a knock on the door, and if it were, it seems

unlikely that Joyce would have permitted a visitor to interrupt hiswork in the middle of dictation, and so did not say 'Come in').When work resumed, I further speculate, Joyce, wishing, as Ellmann suggests, to incorporate Beckett's mistake into the text, sawa way out by simply turning the ending in the first draft into ariddle, the answer to which is a pretty familiar one to readers ofFW: the heliotrope. (O holytroopers').5



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Beckett inTheWake 423I find additional support for the notion that the passage in

question has reference to dictation to Beckett by what I take tobe an allusion to the laureate in the phrase 'Sammy, call on.' Further, the context of the paragraph contains references to forms ofpunctuation, such as a careful person would dictate:

Fools stop (Full stop) 222.23Punct. (Period -Punkt~G) 222.26Sammy, call on. (semi-colon) 222.36-223.1A space 223.23

No doubt there are others that I have missed.The final phrase, which does not appear in Hayman's transcription of the text of the first draft?'Isot givin yoe?' presents difficulty,and points towards the possibility of autobiographical elements inthe Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies, particularly as to the

identity of Chuff and Glugg. This paragraph seems to me to begrounded in Joyce's domestic situation in (let us say) the year1932, a year covered in Ellmann's biography in a chapter that alsoincludes the Beckett anecdote. In her early twenties, Lucia wasalready suffering from personality disorders that would laterharden into schizophenia. A lonely, tormented girl ('Mirrylambshe was shuffering all the diseasiness of the unherd of!), she wasapparently unable to form personal relationships with young menappropriate to her age and culture; neither could she escape thedemands of sexual maturation. ('The trouble with me ... is thatI'm sex-starved' she is reported to have told William Bird).6 Attempts to channel her energies into dancing came to nothing. Joycetried frantically to pretend to himself that she was a normal girl,but he must have realized to some extent the gravity of her condition. I think some his conflicting emotions about Lucia are reflected in the opening sentence of the passage:

Aminxt that nombre of evelings, but how pierceful in theirsojestiveness were those first girly stirs, with zitterings of flightreleased and twingling of twitchbells in rondel after, with

waverings that made shimmershake rather naightily all theduskcended airs and shylit beaconings from shehind hims back.One solution was to encourage young men to visit: 'Sammy,call on.' "Sammy" had called on the Joyces, but his purpose from



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424Hugh B. Staplesthe first was apparently to develop his acquaintance with Joyce.We are told that Beckett took Lucia out on dates, but as soon asher passion for him became obvious, he felt compelled to repel heradvances, and told her that he was really interested in her father.7

University of Cincinnati

NOTES1. A Wake Newslitter, III #3, (June, 1966), 54-56.2. Ellmann, James Joyce, 662.3. Text is from the Faber edition (1964).4. Hayman, A First-Draft of Finnegans Wake, 130.5. Anthony Burgess 'explains' this version of the riddle in a fashionthat I do not find altogether convincing in Here Comes Everybody, p. 221.6. Ellmann, 662.7. Ellmann, 662.


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Beckett in the "Wake"