Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read Free Page B

College, which had been typed and corrected by Samuel Beckett, though the Reading copy, which was not transcribed by him and differs from the Dartmouth original in minor respects, was also consulted.
    Whatever the scholastic merits or demerits of
Dream
are judged to be, in introducing the book sixty years after it was written, we do so knowing that it will bring considerable wealth to many, perhaps especially to youth, for the book has not aged and it is a book of humour and sensitivity, of hope and music, much music.
Dream
can be read at two levels at least. Continuing the musical analogy, the reader can simply hum the tune and the air is a catching one, or he can, if he has the mind to do it, study the musicand fail not to be enthralled. It is also a book of colour, pervaded by Samuel Beckett's technique of invoking colour to heighten mood with a unique chromatic intensity.
    A special word of thanks to Jérôme Lindon who made this undertaking possible, to Paul Bennett who patiently withstood our numerous typesetting changes, to the Board of Black Cat Press, most especially Ted and Ursula O'Brien, and Tona, each of whom understood the importance of
Dream.
I am also indebted to Kevin and Kate Cahill, Caroline Murphy and Edward Beckett, John Calder, the Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire and the Beckett Archive, Reading University. In their different ways all participated in bringing this prodigal novel to awakefulness.
    Eoin O'Brien,
Seapoint,
June 1992

DREAM OF FAIR
to middling
WOMEN

A thousand sythes have I herd men telle, That ther is joye in heven, and peyne in helle; But—
    Geoffrey Chaucer

ONE
    Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater's van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat wet rump of the hoss. Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah…!
    And what is more he is to be surprised some years later climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium.

TWO
    Belacqua sat on the stanchion at the end of the Carlyle Pier in the mizzle in love from the girdle up with a slob of a girl called Smeraldina-Rima whom he had encountered one evening when as luck would have it he happened to be tired and her face more beautiful than stupid. His fatigue on that fatal occasion making him attentive to her face only, and that part of her shining as far as he could make out with an unearthly radiance, he had so far forgotten himself as to cast all over and moor in the calm curds of her bosom which he had rashly deduced from her features that left nothing but death to be desired as one that in default of Abraham's would do very nicely to be going on with in this frail world that is all temptation and knighthood. Then ere he could see through his feeling for her she mentioned that she cared for nothing in heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth so much as the music of Bach and that she was taking herself off almost at once and for good and all to Vienna to study the pianoforte. The result of this was that the curds put forth suckers of sargasso, and enmeshed him.
    So now he sagged on the stanchion in the grateful mizzle after the supreme adieu, his hands in a jelly in hislap, his head drooped over his hands, pumping up the little blirt. He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched off his mind and let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind till it thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a second too soon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gush was quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He found that the best way to turn over the piston in the first instance was to think of the béret