Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read Free

it provides into the temperament, intellect, talent, and interests of the young Beckett and constitutes the necessary point of departure in assessing his development as a writer”.
    Dream
is indeed such and very much more besides. It is a major literary achievement and this consideration, together with Samuel Beckett's wishes in regard to publication, led his literary executor and long-time friend, Jérôme Lindon, to grant permission for me to edit
Dream
for publication.
    Up to now
Dream
has been available only to scholars and researchers who could peruse the original manuscript in the Dartmouth archives, or, later on, a typed transcription of it in the Beckett Archive at Reading University. This has led inevitably to an unsatisfactory state of affairs whereby much of
Dream
has been quoted and published, with more or less appropriate comments, in substantial extracts which deny the reader an objective, unbiased and personal appreciation of the whole novel. Moreover, such extracts can but dangerously misrepresent the entire work.
    Samuel Beckett himself, as I have pointed out, “pilfered the chest” which served as a point of commencement for many later works—
Happy Days
and
Krapp's Last Tape
spring to mind. It was also a depository for some earlier writings—the poems “Enueg I”, “Dortmunder”, “Alba” and “Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin” being examples. Substantial parts of
Dream
appear almost verbatim in
More Pricks than Kicks,
notable examples being “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux”, “Ding-Dong” and “A Wet Night”. Here again such extracts canbut give a restricted and pale idea of the whole novel.
More Pricks than Kicks
is a collection of vignettes of Dublin life;
Dream of Fair to middling Women
has the wealth of the complete form and full structure of a novel about a young man, his loves and travels in Europe.
    Thus
Dream
provides us with some precious, almost
archaeological,
insights into the developing aesthetics of a remarkable mind, demonstrating the path that the later works were to follow. For example, we see the artist in turmoil with himself and with art:
    The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface.
    As Samuel Beckett struggles with the essence of the artistic experience, solutions become apparent:
    â€¦ we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best.
    The future form of writing, if not yet apparent in the exuberance of
Dream,
may be seen, nonetheless, clearly taking shape:
    I was speaking of something of which you have and can have no knowledge, the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven. Their names occur to me. The terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of insane areas of silence.
    Indeed, the expression of his unique vision was only to be fully realised later, when he returned spiritually to the “chest” to find once again the way forward:
    The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory.
    Dream
should not, however, be considered only with a backward glance from the vantage point Samuel Beckett's completed
œuvre
provides us with today. Whatever its progeny may have been in the author's later writings, it stands on its own, imposing itself on us with its