"Mirlitonnades" notebook

BC MS 2901

1977

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 with handwritten alterations by the author.Notebook containing 173 pages (p.33-173 blank). Index of contents in Beckett's hand on inside of back cover. Contains drafts of the 35 poems published as the Mirlitonnades in Poèmes ; suivi de Mirlitonnades / Samuel Beckett, Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1978, as well as other Mirlitonnades published in: Poems 1930-1989 / Samuel Beckett, London : John Calder, 2002. Each draft is dated and has a location (e.g. Paris, Ussy, Tangiers).Also contains other poems in French and English, including One dead of night (p.12), dated St[uttgart] 26.6.77, as well as notes relating to Company and quotations from Heine, Johnson, Mallarmé, Pope, Schopenhauer and Voltaire.Also known as: The "Sottisier" notebook.Former reference number: duplicateBECKETT COLLECTION--MSS POETRY/MIR 02-1Original manuscript notebook with badly tanned calf spine and ‘wood grain’ design hard-covers. 12 x 9 cm. 86 leaves, many blank. Entries date from 1976-1982. Front inside cover is inscribed by Beckett, ‘Rimailles/Rhymeries/versicule(t)s’ and the notebook contains the holograph manuscripts, dated between 1976-1978, of the thirty-five poems in French published by Editions de Minuit in Poèmes suivi de mirlitonnades (Paris, 1978). The poems are numbered by Beckett, but the order is not always that of the published text; the sequence is broken by other material in the book, including various random jottings and quotations from, among others, Dr. Johnson, Pascal and Dante. There are several poems written subsequently to the 1978 publication, and some English language verses. The latest piece here is dated 11 March 1982. The earliest, on the inside front cover, and beginning ‘rentrer/ à la nuit’ is dated 1976 and suffixed ‘Hans Meyer’. Question marks placed by Beckett by some of the dates suggest a transcription from the loose sheets of MS 2460 to a more durable notebook form. Indeed, not all dates concur with those in MS 2460.Original holograph manuscript of a seventeen-line poem in English beginning ‘One dead of night’. On f.12 of the ‘Sottiser’ notebook. One leaf; 12 x 9 cm. Dated 26 June 1977. Uncorrected, seemingly completed draft in black ink. The date places its composition during the period of intense poetic productivity which produced the mirlitonnades, although the length and form of this poem is unlike that of those published. The poem is divided into seven sections by short, horizontal dashes; the sections are four, two, three, one, five, one and one lines long respectively.A short prose piece written in English in the late 1970s and translated into French as Compagnie. Original manuscript notebook containing notes pertaining to Company, 12 x 9 cm. Hard covers with wood-grain design and badly tanned calf spine. 86 leaves, ff. 17-85 blank. Company notes are found on ff. 1-2; f. 1 dated 16 January 1976. All material in this notebook is written and corrected by Beckett in black ink. Notes between’16.1.76’ and ’11.3.82’ are found here. The notes towards Company are titles on f.2 ‘VERBATIM’, the earliest extant title for the work. The notes on f.1 consist of three separate listings, the first untitled, the second headed ‘Harping’ and the third ‘Other characteristics’. The first list of four phrases begins ‘No hearing anywhere- deaf speaker’; the ‘Harping’ section has two entries, the first beginning ‘1. Unavoidable (want of words and matter- variety)’. The ‘Other characteristics’ listing contains nine entries, including ‘Old’, ‘Breathless’ and ‘Estranged from words, things.’ Beckett’s p.2 (verso f.1) is headed ‘title: VERBATIM’. This is followed by brief notes on relationship of three voices which are simultaneously the same voice, recalling the detailed notes for Voice in the That Time manuscript/typescript sequence- ‘A, B, C one and the same’, for example. Notes also on ‘Variations on theme’ and descriptions on ‘A describes A (to A)’. This notebook, known as the ‘Sottisier’, contains various notes in Beckett’s hand with quotations from, for example, Dante, Voltaire, Parnell and Mallarmé. Also contains manuscripts of the short poems in French published by Editions de Minuit in 1978 as Mirlitonnades, along with more recent poems of similar scale in French and English. Short deleted prose piece dated 28 December 1980 on f.14.Small notebook with leather spine and mottled covers. 12 x 9 cm. 85 leaves, ff. 17-85 blank. Entries date from 1976-82. Notebook contains jottings in Beckett’s hand, including quotations from, among others, Voltaire, Pope, Johnson, Parnell, Schopenhauer and Mallarmé. Drafts of poems in English and French include some of the Mirlitonnades. The first two pages contain draft notes prefiguring Company.

1 item ; 12 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.

MS 5531 C/2/7