Comment dire

BC MS 3316

1988

Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, County Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. Although throughout his life he had the reputation of being sombre, mysterious and reclusive, this popular myth hid a very private, yet immensely generous, gracious and caring person. On entering Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett developed his interest in art, music and literature. He was a gifted linguist who also enjoyed vaudeville theatre and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. An academic career seemed to be the obvious option on graduating but, after spells teaching in Paris and Dublin, Beckett realised he was more suited to the artistic lifestyle he had encountered in Paris in the company of James Joyce. Having witnessed the intolerance of the Nazi regime towards writers and artists in Germany in 1936, Beckett famously decided that he preferred France at war to Ireland in peace, opting to live in France for the rest of his life. However, this bold decision was more than a mere gesture. Beckett was forced to spend much of the war on the run from the Nazis in the South of France working with the French Resistance, for which he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. The end of the war marked a burst of literary activity for Beckett, who began writing, in French, a dense prose trilogy comprising Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. As a relaxation from this project, between October 1948 and January 1949, Beckett worked on a play entitled En attendant Godot - the work which brought him international fame and recognition and which redefined modern theatre. Further literary success ensued, culminating in him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. As the years progressed, Beckett's prose and drama decreased in length, as he found increasingly successful ways to express the inexpressible. Yet throughout his career, he remained a bilingual author, creating French and English versions of almost all his work. During the 1970s Beckett directed his major stage plays in Berlin in German, exhibiting another side of his character. His success in this field led him to direct his own plays created specifically for television - a medium which seemed perfect for the stark, imposing images of these later, minimalist pieces. Samuel Beckett died on 22 December 1989 and was buried in a private ceremony in the Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris.

Manuscript.Sporting Herakles notebook with female windsurfer design containing 68 pages (p.8-68 blank). Pages 1-7 (plus page tipped in on p.7) contain drafts of Comment dire. Dated 29.10.88 at top of p.7.Final draft on p.7 published in facsimile form: Paris : Librarie Compagnie, 1989.Former reference number: BECKETT COLLECTION--MSS POETRY/COM 01Poem written originally in French, in 1988, as ‘Comment dire’. Original manuscript and notes toward ‘Comment dire’ in exercise book, ‘Sporting-Herakles’ design with colour photograph of female windsurfer on front cover. Dated f.2, September 1988, dated f.4 (final version), 29 October 1988. 22 x 17 cm; 34 leaves. Manuscript material found on verso f.1-recto f.4. Rest of book blank. Written and corrected in black ink. On verso f.1, recto and part of verso f.2, and recto f.3 Beckett has written on the lined exercise book pages themselves. The lower part of verso f.2, all of verso f.3 and recto f.4 have supplementary sheets attached upon which Beckett has written compositional drafts toward the poem. This version is a sixteen-line draft, immediately revised below by a substantially corrected twenty-seven-line draft which concludes ‘comment dire-‘, the first appearance of the eventual title. The next page (verso f.2) has various random notes on the page itself and a forty0line draft on a piece of squared paper, again substantially corrected, glued to the page, obscuring some on the notes beneath. There is further extensive revision on recto f.3, with two full drafts, both extensively corrected. Many marginal, experimental notes, words and phrases fringe the drafts. Verso f.3 and recto f.4 both carry attached sheets, featuring the last two drafts of the poem. Recto f.3 is moderately revised; verso f.4 carries a quartet of minor corrections. The piece of paper which carries this penultimate version has been folded by Beckett and on its internal face there is the uncorrected, final, titled and dated version of ‘comment dire’. Thus there are, in all, seven drafts of the poem from its inception to its completion, placed chronologically by Beckett in this exercise book.MS 3316/2: Photocopy of manuscript material towards ‘Comment dire’ found in notebook MS 3316/1. 7 leaves; 30 x 21 cm. (A4 copies).

1 notebook (68 p.) ; 22 cm.

French

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The copying of any of Beckett’s handwriting and sketches, or any unpublished letters, typescripts, manuscripts or draft versions of his work that differ from the final published version is not permitted.

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