Samuel Beckett Turns 100
April 13 marks the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett. To celebrate, his longtime American publisher Grove Atlantic has issued a four-volume edition of his works. Edited by Paul Auster, it includes the plays and novels that made Beckett famous—
Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and his trilogy of novels,
Malloy, Malone Dies, and
The Unnamable—and, tucked away in the fourth volume, a collection of works that figure to surprise many—poems.
Thirty poems, in fact, including the entirety of
Echo's Bones, his only published collection. Published in 1935 in Paris by his friend George Reavey, in an edition of 327,
Echo's Bones included
"Serena I." Over the years, while most of his attention was turned to playwriting and fiction, Beckett would occasionally scrawl out a poem, such as another we have archived,
"Cascando," which he wrote during a break from his early novel Murphy. The poems forecast the slapstick, the incisive humor, and the desire for silence that mark his later work.
Though an older Beckett described
Echo's Bones as "the work of a very young man with nothing to say and the itch to make," he didn't dismiss the poems outright. Over the years, he allowed the collection to be translated in several languages, and never interfered with the publication of a new edition. In November 1934, he even submitted a few of the poems to the most prominent literary periodical of its time,
Poetry.
The poems were rejected, though the editor, Morton Dauwen Zabel sent back a note, written in an underwhelming yet to-the-quick style not dissimilar to Beckett's own: "Maybe. I feel lukewarmish."
—Nick Twemlow
