Dream of Fair to Middling Women

DREAM
OF FAIR

to middling

WOMEN

DREAM
OF FAIR

to middling

WOMEN
              a novel

SAMUEL

BECKETT

Edited by Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier
Foreword by Eoin O'Brien

Copyright © 1992, 2011 by The Samuel Beckett Estate

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-313-3

Printed in China

The publication of Samuel Beckett's
Dream of Fair to middling Women
is an important event, both in itself and because, at long last, it brings to the public an essential text that has too long been available only to scholars.

Much will be made of the fact that Beckett did not allow the work to be published during his lifetime, and that when he referred to it, it was generally in derogatory terms. But those of us who knew Beckett for a long time—in my case roughly forty years—are well aware that he was prone to deprecate most, if not all, of his earlier work. Even
Waiting for Godot
did not go unscathed. In the 1970s when my wife and I were invited to see the revival of
Godot,
which was staged at the Odéon theater in Paris, we met the author after the play at a café in Montparnasse. Beckett was nursing a drink, and when we arrived he stood and greeted us warmly, as always, but then sat down and resumed communing for what seemed to us a very long time with the drink. Finally he asked us what we had thought of the play. We waxed enthusiastic, our reaction sincere, as he listened in silence. He knew that we had seen the original production some twenty years before at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone. “The stage is too big,” he said, “far too big,” referring
to the generous proportions of the Odeon. We agreed that perhaps the play had lost a smidgen of its intimacy, but none of its power. He shook his head. “The text,” he said, “it doesn't stand up….” His voice trailed off. Would he have liked to go back and change it? No, he couldn't do that. It was what it was. But, on an evening that, from our viewpoint, should have been a celebration—for bringing
Godot
to the Odeon, a national theater, was a consecration—there was a definite undertone of wake on the part of the author. He, who was constantly honing, paring away the words that seemed either excessive or imprecise, moving ineluctably toward the silence that had always been so important to him, could see nothing but the flaws. Despite that, we eventually repaired, with the play's designer, Alberto Giacometti—whose stark set at the Odeon Beckett did fully appreciate—to a
boîte
a block or two away where, late in the evening, Beckett actually accepted an invitation to get up and dance.

All this is to say that if he was harsh about
Waiting for Godot,
a play that had revolutionized contemporary theater, was universally hailed as a masterpiece, and was constantly being performed around the world, one can readily imagine how unremitting his judgment could be of his earlier work. It took years and years of cajoling to get him to allow publication of
Mercier and Camier,
or the reissue of works long out of print such as
More Pricks than Kicks
or
Whoroscope.
The fact is that when he wrote
Dream of Fair to middling Women,
he ardently desired to see it published. He wrote it in the summer of 1932, after having abruptly resigned his teaching post at Trinity College, Dublin, finding teaching to be anathema to him, and he wrote it in what has been described as a “white heat,” finishing it before the end of summer. Having given up his
two hundred pounds per annum stipend from Trinity, and with only symbolic monetary help from his parents, he felt the urgent need to earn some money from his writing. He knew that the book—which among other things contained incidents of sexual congress and masturbation, or what could very well be taken for such—could not be published in his native country, for reasons of censorship, which the editors of the present volume describe. He also knew it was impossible for any French publisher to take on and translate the novel, with its puns and wordplay, its word inventions and intentional misspellings. Most of his literary connections were in Paris, but the little magazines there were not in a position to publish more than an extract or two.

That left London. Beckett took the manuscript to England and sent it around to various British publishers. Chatto and Windus, who the previous year had published Beckett's perceptive essay on Proust to critical praise and considerable commercial success, seemed a likely prospect, as did the young, literary-oriented houses, Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press. But by early autumn 1932, he had found no takers and was down to his last five-pound note. One publisher's reader noted: “Beckett's probably a clever fellow… but I wouldn't touch this with a bargepole.” Another commented that it was “a slavish imitation of Joyce.” Its erotic content was also duly noted, needless to say negatively, and the word
indecent
was prominent in the evaluation. On October 8, 1932, Beckett wrote from Dublin, to which he was forced to retreat after his London debacle, to his close friend and fellow poet George Reavey:

The novel doesn't go. Shatton and Windup thought it was wonderful, but they couldn't, they simply could
not. The Hogarth Private Lunatic Asylum rejected it the way Punch would. Cape was écoeueré
[sic]
in pipe and cardigan and his aberdeen terrier agreed with it. Grayson has lost it or cleaned himself with it. Kick his balls off. They are all over 66 Curzon St. W.l.

I'll be here till I die, creeping along genteel roads on a stranger's bike.

Subsequently, Beckett sent the novel to other British publishers, but to no avail. That he wanted it published and was sorely disappointed when it was not is uncontestable.

Twenty years after this first effort at publication, another opportunity arose for the book, at long last, to see the light of day. In 1951, a young group of us living in Paris began publishing a literary magazine reminiscent in many ways of those that flowered when Beckett first came to Paris. In the second issue of that magazine I wrote an essay on Beckett in which, with fairly little to go on—
Murphy, Molloy,
and
Malone Dies
—I proclaimed Beckett a writer of major importance “to anyone interested in contemporary literature.” Subsequently,
Merlin
featured something by Beckett in virtually every issue of the magazine. When, the following year, the
Merlin
group began to publish an occasional book and, having heard that Beckett—who by then was writing and publishing in French—had one, possibly two, unpublished manuscripts in English, I wrote the author through the intermediary of his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon, asking if
Merlin
could see it/them, with a view toward publication. The two were,
Dream of Fair to middling Women
and
Watt,
the second of which Beckett had written in the Vaucluse during the war. Eventually
Beckett brought by the manuscript of
Watt,
which “Collection Merlin” duly published in 1953 in an edition of 1,125 copies, of which 25 were a limited edition signed by the author and 1,100 intended for “general circulation.” Beckett again wrote his old friend George Reavey, who after World War II had made a valiant effort to place
Watt
with a British publisher, without success:

Also, (tiens-toi bien) our old misery, Watt [is due out] with the Merlin juveniles, who are beginning a publishing house.

Two months later, after the book appeared, Beckett wrote Reavey again:

Watt is just out in an awful magenta cover from the Merlin Press.

Subsequently, we approached him with the idea of publishing the “other novel in English,” but Beckett politely declined. Whether his attitude was the result of the “awful magenta” cover of
Watt
or his reluctance to see
Dream
in print at that time will forever remain a mystery.

There was a final possibility the novel might be published in Beckett's lifetime. In 1986, when Beckett's longtime friend, American publisher Barney Rosset, was unceremoniously deposed from Grove Press, the publishing house he had founded, Beckett, quite characteristically, looked for ways to help. The best way would be to give him an unpublished work, and
Dream
came immediately to mind. Beckett discussed the idea with the future
editor of the work, Eoin O'Brien, who had recently published the monumental
The Beckett Country,
which the author greatly admired, but eventually Beckett decided he could not face the pain—O'Brien's words—of going back to the manuscript. But, as O'Brien relates in his Foreword, Beckett did recognize that the book should indeed be published, but not until “some little time after my death.”

There is doubtless a kind of ironic, if belated, justice in the fact that, after all,
Dream of Fair to middling Women
was first published in Ireland, the only one of his works to be so honored, under the aegis of the Black Cat Press, of which Eoin O'Brien is a principal. I suspect, too, that Beckett would have been pleased to know that this first, simultaneous American and U.K. edition of “the chest into which [he] threw [his] wild thoughts” has been a collaborative effort between two of his oldest friends and publishing colleagues, his British publisher John Calder and me, and that Barney Rosset's advice and counsel on many key aspects of the publishing process of the work were cogent and perceptive.

—Richard Seaver

“The chest into which I threw my wild thoughts.