The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 Part 7

For Beckett's first short story, "a.s.sumption," the text reprinted here is that corrected and collected in Transition Workshop (1949, vide below). Two separately published stories from Dream of Fair to Middling Women have been included in this collection because they were published as separate stories, "Sedendo et Quiescendo" and "Text," and the texts established by Dr. Eoin O'Brien based on his editing of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992; and New York: Arcade Press, 1993) have been adopted here.

As the text of Samuel Beckett's first published short story, "a.s.sumption," suggests, editors have not always been kind to or careful with Samuel Beckett's work. It seems astonis.h.i.+ng that for so important a publication, his first story in a journal publis.h.i.+ng James Joyce's Work in Progress, (transition 1617 [June 1929]: 26871) "a.s.sumption" should have been so poorly edited and proofread. If we except the obsolete spelling of "extasy" as indeed Beckett's (although it was revised in the reprint cited below), no fewer than five glaring typographical errors mar Beckett's first published piece of short fiction. Those errors were corrected only twenty years later in the reprint for transition workshop, edited by Eugene Jolas (New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1949), 4144; that text is reprinted here.

The original text for "Sedendo et Quiescendo" is even more corrupt than that for the original printing of "a.s.sumption," except that the story has not heretofore been reprinted and so errors in the first printing have not been corrected. The number of errors in these first two transition stories suggests that Beckett never read proofs for either of them. For "Sedendo et Quiescendo," for instance, even the t.i.tle was incorrect: the transition version reads "Sedendo et Quiesciendo." Like Dream of Fair to Middling Women, of which it finally became a part, "Sedendo et Quiescendo" is filled with the sort of Joycean wordplay that makes distinguis.h.i.+ng error from linguistic play very difficult. Moreover, the version incorporated into Dream of Fair to Middling Women has been substantially revised-in places rewritten-so that the novel is not always an accurate guide to Beckett's thinking for this story version. On the whole, the ludic elements increased as Beckett absorbed story into novel. What in the story, for instance, was "a shadowy stasis between tram and sidewalk" became in the novel "an umbral stasis twixt tram and trottoir"; the "cold in the head" of the story became the "constipated coryza" of the novel; the story's "Wonderful" became the novel's "Wunnerful." The editor has, however, retained the integrity of the original story version in this printing so that readers can make their own comparisons.

The text printed in this current edition was corrected as follows: "garden of Eden" to "Garden of Eden"; "he doesn't mush care" to "he doesn't much care"; "properties of the appropiate kind" to "properties of the appropriate kind"; "mailing his cheekbones" to "nailing his cheekbones"; "on him or to horn" to "on him or to him"; "(Nth Gt. Georges St." to "(Nth Gt. George's St."; "a kind of contapuntal" to "a kind of contrapuntal"; "Bramaputra" to "Brahmaputra"; and finally, "he's gota bit wasted" to "he's got a bit wasted."

For "First Love" Beckett evidently made a series of revisions for the British text that never appeared in the American edition. The third paragraph of the American text begins, "Personally I have nothing against graveyards...." But Beckett evidently could not resist a lastminute pun and revised the British text to "Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards." Such late revisions were not uncommon for Beckett. Barry McGovern reports (Independent on Sunday, 31 December 1989), for instance, that Beckett for a time was tempted to revise the last sentence of "Dante and the Lobster" from "It is not" to "Like h.e.l.l it is," but that revision never appeared in print. The revision to the British text of "First Love," on the other hand, has appeared in print as Beckett's latest revision and so has been adopted here. In the book version of "Sedendo et Quiescendo," however, Beckett changed "I don't believe it" in the first paragraph to "Like h.e.l.l it does."

A number of other small changes have been made to the American text of "First Love": "But my father's yard was not among my favourite" was changed in the Collected Shorter Prose 19431980 to "amongst my favourites." The first American printing missed the g in "grottoes," which has here been restored. And "To put it wildly" of the first British and American editions has been corrected to "To put it mildly." "They would have had to gas me out" of the American printing has been revised to "nothing less than gas would have dislodged me," as it appears in Collected Shorter Prose 19431980. Likewise, "I hate forgetting a proper name" became "I hate to forget ..."; "sotto voce" became "beneath her breath"; and "even more dead than alive" became "even more dead than alive than usual."

The three British editions of "All Strange Away," including the separately published volume (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1979), contain errors corrected only in the Grove Press edition, Rockaby and Other Short Pieces (New York: Grove Press, 1981), for which, evidently, Beckett read proof-at least the "toward" of the British editions, for example, is revised to the form Beckett preferred, "towards," in the Grove Press text, and "towards" is decidedly not a common American usage. (See, for example, Nicholson's American-English Usage: "the -s form is the prevailing one in Brit., toward in the US," p. 595.) In addition, all British editions print the following, "Last look oh not farewell but last for now on left side...." "Left," however, was revised to "right" for the Grove edition. The Grove text, furthermore, contains a phrase missing from all British texts, "... better unchanging black or glare one or the other or between the two...." With Beckett's revision the sentence near the end of the story then reads, "All that if not yet quite complete quite clear and little change likely unless perhaps to complete unless perhaps somehow light sudden gleam perhaps better fixed and all this flowing and ebbing to full and empty more harm than good and better unchanging black or glare one or the other or between the two soft white unchanging...." Moreover, the word "head" is missing from the following sentence in all British texts: "thus the fall back to where she lay wedged against wall...." The corrected Grove text reads: "thus the fall back to where she lay head wedged against wall...." In all, the Grove text contains some twelve to sixteen corrections or revisions of the British text, depending, of course, on which British version is being compared. The Journal of Beckett Studies printing contained, for instance, typographical errors corrected for the separately published and collected printings.

When actor David Warrilow was performing the stage adaptation of Beckett's story The Lost Ones in Germany, a literary critic approached him after the show to suggest that the dimensions of the cylinder, "fifty metres round and eighteen high," could not be correct. If the total surface of the cylinder (or even the total wall or "mural" surface) were to be 80,000 square centimeters, as all book versions of the story have it, then the cylinder would have to be minuscule. Warrilow replied that he would see Beckett himself the following day and pose the question of the cylinder's dimensions to him directly. Beckett acknowledged that "the figure eighteen was indeed a most regrettable error." Some time later when Warrilow was making a film version of the story, he checked with Beckett a second time and Beckett confirmed the figure of sixteen meters, adding, "After all, you can't play fast and loose with pi" (see "From David Warrilow," As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers [London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1986; and New York: Riverrun Press, 1986, 87-88]).

In fact, the original French text prints the dimensions as sixteen meters high, as does the American publication in Evergreen Review No. 96 (Spring 1973): 41-64. The Evergreen Review edition, however, presents the total surface area as "twelve million" square centimeters, while the French edition, Le Depeupleur, has it at "quatre-vingt mille centimetres carres" (80,000 square centimeters), an erroneous surface area for a cylinder of either sixteen or eighteen meters high with a circ.u.mference of fifty meters. The Evergreen Review version seems to contain the correct figures. If one includes the area of the ceiling and floor of a cylinder sixteen by fifty meters, the total surface would be about 12 million square centimeters-eight million for the wall surface and 2 million each for the areas of ceiling and floor. Beckett, or rather the narrator, confirms these figures in the third paragraph of the story: "Inside a cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony or a total surface of roughly twelve hundred square metres [or 12 million square centimeters, i.e., including ceiling and floor] of which eight hundred [square meters or 8 million square centimeters] mural [i.e., wall area]." All book versions of the story, however, present the total surface area on the opening page as 80,000 centimeters square. In addition, both British and American book versions of the story, the latter simply photo-offset from the British edition (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972) in which the errors above were introduced, transpose the numbers in the following: "The short queue is not necessarily the most rapid and such a one starting tenth may well find himself first before such another starting fifth a.s.suming of course they start together" (Evergreen Review, p. 58). With the figures reversed, the sentence makes no sense, but the transposed figures appear in all British and American book editions. In Le Depeupleur (p. 42) the figures accord with those of the Evergreen Review edition. The Evergreen Review edition, however, contains one variant. It drops the number from the following: "The more so as the two storms have this in common" (p. 56). The current publication restores the original French and American figure of sixteen meters for the cylinder's height but uses the total surface area of 12 million square centimeters for the cylinder, the figure that is mathematically accurate and that appears in the Evergreen Review edition. The current text as well has the queue with ten people move faster than the queue with five people as it does in the Evergreen Review and in Le Depeupleur, and retains the number of storms at "two" as it is in all book versions. In addition, "forgo" (do without) has replaced "forego" (go before) in "no searcher can readily forgo the ladder."

"The Image," a short piece written on the way to Comment c'est (How It Is), was originally published in French in the inaugural issue of a magazine called simply X: A Quarterly Review, edited by David Wright and Patrick Swift. An English version first appeared in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1990), 31-40, but it was met with much suspicion by readers and scholars who argued, on the basis of internal evidence, that the unacknowledged translation could not have been Samuel Beckett's. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement of 26 October1 November 1990, for instance, John Crombie points out: "Mr. Calder informs us that during the writing of Comment c'est, into which pa.s.sages of L'Image, suitably reworked, were incorporated, Beckett moved from French to English and back-seeming to suggest that the text of 'The Image' is wholly by Beckett himself. But even a cursory comparison of L'Image and Comment c'est reveals that the text of 'The Image' is cobbled together from sc.r.a.ps taken, quite properly, from How It Is-i.e., using Beckett's own English-and sc.r.a.ps very definitely not from How It Is, upon which the nameless translator's skills have been brought, with disconcerting results, to bear. The resulting unevenness, to use no unkinder word, has been compounded, to put it mildly, by the fact that in many of the pa.s.sages where L'lmage and Comment c'est coincide and Beckett's own renderings were available, these have been disdained, or perhaps not even noticed, the translator offering his or her own approximations in place of Beckett's self-translation." "L'Image," then, was retranslated by Edith Fournier for this collection, and she notes that "Numerous similarities do occur" between "L'Image" and Comment c'est, "and in such cases the elements of the author's own translation of the final version as it appears in How It Is have here been closely respected."

The short prose work "neither" was originally published in the Journal of Beckett Studies No. 4 (Spring 1979) with line breaks suggestive of a poem. During the editing process, moreover, a word was dropped from the eighty-seven-word work. The omission was evidently not immediately noticed, for the correction did not appear until issue No. 6 in the Autumn of 1980, where, in his "Editorial," John Pilling noted, "It is very much regretted that the word 'neared' was accidentally omitted from the end of the fourth line of the text neither printed in issue 4 at post page-proof stage beyond the control of the editors" (p. 6). When the British publisher of Beckett's fiction and poetry, John Calder, was about to publish the work in the Collected Poems, Beckett resisted because he considered it a piece of prose, a story. As John Calder says in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (24-30 August 1990), he had "originally intended to put ["neither"] in the Collected Poems. We did not do so, because Beckett at the last moment said that it was not a poem and should not be there" (p. 895). Subsequently, it was omitted inadvertently from The Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1984), but printed in a more corrupt version in the posthumous As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Later Prose (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd.; and New York: Riverrun Press, 1990). The printing was corrupted not only by the introduction of erroneous information (the story, identified in the Journal of Beckett Studies as "written by Samuel Beckett in September 1976 to be set to music by Morton Feldman," is described in As the Story Was Told as having been "[w]ritten for composer Morton Feldman, 1962") but when "neither" was finally collected not only was the t.i.tle capitalized, but instead of including the word missing from the Journal of Beckett Studies printing, a copy editor's query marking the place of the lost word was taken by the printer as an addition to the text and was retained in publication; line six (in the collected edition) then reads, "doors once? gently close, once turned" instead of "doors once neared gently close, once turned...." Moreover, since the piece is a work of prose, there is no question of retaining the line endings of either the Journal of Beckett Studies or the As the Story Was Told texts.

Stirrings Still contains the misspelling of "withersoever" for "whithersoever" on page 4 of the de luxe edition. Critic Gerry Dukes pointed out the typographical error in his review of the volume in the Irish Times (15 April 1989). When the Irish actor Barry McGovern brought the error to Beckett's attention, the author made the correction in McGovern's copy. The error is, however, reproduced in the American trade edition by North Star Line but corrected in the version printed in As the Story Was Told (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd. and New York: Riverrun Press, 1990). The Calder edition, however, introduces a new error: "whereabouts" for the original and correct "whenceabouts" (p. 122). Thanks to Gerry Dukes for these details.

"The Capital of the Ruins," a short piece of reportage on the Irish Hospital in St. L6 written for broadcast by Irish radio, has been shrouded in mystery, confusion, and error since its discovery amid the archives of Radio Telefis eireann in 1983 and its publication in 1986. It was first published "in full incorporating all the ma.n.u.script changes in Beckett's hand," by Eoin O'Brien in The Beckett Country (Monkstown, Ireland: The Black Cat Press, 1986), 333-37. The piece was subsequently published that same year in As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1986), 71-76 with a brief commentary by Dougald McMillan, who also claims that the script is "published here for the first time" (p. 71). Although McMillan rightly identifies the quirky t.i.tle of the piece with a booklet of photographs of the bombed-out city of St. Lo ent.i.tled St. Lo, Capital des Ruines, 5 et 7 Juin 1944, he claims that the piece "was read by Beckett on Radio Erin on 10 June 1946," the date in Beckett's hand on the final page of the three-sheet typescript. There is, however, no evidence for that claim. On the contrary, Dairmuid Breathnach, Chief Librarian of Radio Telefis eireann, notes in correspondence with the editor: "The radio logs for a period of 18 months after 10 June 1946 have been examined but we have been unable to trace a date of transmission. There is no file of correspondence with Beckett in our written archives and there is no entry for Beckett in the fee cards of the period." The probability is that the piece, more than likely commissioned by Riobard O Farachain, general features officer at RTE (and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre for thirty years), whose initials appear on the first page of the typescript, was never broadcast.

Both English texts cited above, moreover, include all the autograph emendations to the typed text as if they were Beckett's solely, but clearly those emendations are in several hands. I queried Beckett about the ma.n.u.script and the revisions to it in July 1983 just after the ma.n.u.script's discovery, and he wrote back on 23 July 1983: "No memory whatever of the St. Lo piece. As you say it seems to have been improved here and there by some third party-or parties." The "improvements" are stylistic rather than substantive, but nonetheless Beckett's exact prose ought to be recovered and retained wherever possible. In the first case the word "left" was added by another hand in "There was not enough linoleum left in France to do more than this." The second alteration is syntactically similar. The intrusion affects the first sentence in the second paragraph, which as published reads, "... and perhaps even to those of you listening to me." Beckett actually wrote the more self-deprecating, "... and perhaps even to those listening to the present circ.u.mlocution." The current text restores Beckett's original prose in both instances cited above.

Bibliography of Short Prose in English

The distinction between a discrete short story and a fragment of a novel is not always clear in Beckett's work. For the purposes of this bibliography, however, if an excerpt is identified as part of a longer work in its t.i.tle, it is not included. A partial list of portions of longer works is appended to the bibliography itself.

"All Strange Away," Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 3 (summer 1978): 19.

"All Strange Away," Stereo Headphones, Nos. 8, 9, 10 (1982): 3. [Facsimile typescript.]

"All Strange Away," Rockaby and Other Short Pieces (New York: Grove Press, 1981).

All Strange Away (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1979).

"a.s.sumption," transition 16-17 (June 1929): 268-71. [Reprinted along with the poem "Malacoda" in transition workshop ed. by Eugene Jolas (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1949): 41-44.]

"As the story was told," Gunter Eich zum Gedachtnis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 10[13]. [Reprinted in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose, 103-07.]

"As the story was told," Chicago Review 33.2 (1982): 76-77.

As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1990; New York: Riverrun Press, 1990).

"The Calmative," Evergreen Review 11.47 (June 1967): 46-49, 93-95.

"The Capital of the Ruins," The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland (Monkstown, Ireland: The Black Cat Press [in a.s.sociation with Faber and Faber], 1986), 333-37.

"The Capital of the Ruins," As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1986; New York: Riverrun Press, 1986).

"A Case in a Thousand," The Bookman 86 (August 1934): 24142.

Collected Shorter Prose: 1945-1980 (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1984).

"Dante and the Lobster," This Quarter 5 (December 1932): 222-36. [One of the More p.r.i.c.ks Than Kicks (1934) stories.]

"Dante and the Lobster," Evergreen Review 1.1 (1957): 24-36. [As above.]

"The End," Merlin (Summer 1954). [Translated from the French by Richard Seaver in collaboration with the author.]

"The End," Evergreen Review 4.15 (November-December 1960): 22-41. [As above.]

"Enough," First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974).

"The Expelled," Evergreen Review 6.22 (January-February 1962): 8-20. [Dated 1946. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver in collaboration with the author.]

The Expelled and Other Novellas (Harmondsworth, England; New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

"La Falaise," Celui qui ne peut se servir de mots (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975).

"Faux Depart," Karlsbuch 1 (June 1965): 1-5.

First Love (London: Calder and Boyars, Ltd., 1973). [First publication of First Love written in 1946 along with the other "Stories" or "Nouvelles."]

"First Love," First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974). [Includes "From an Abandoned Work," "Enough," "Imagination Dead Imagine," and "Ping" as well as "First Love."]

"Fizzle 1," Tri Quarterly (In the wake of the Wake) 38 (winter 1977): 163-67. Reprinted in In the Wake of the Wake, ed. by David Hayman and Elliott Anderson (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). ["Fizzle 1" designated according to the order in the original Grove Press edition, i.e., "He is barehead." See also below.]

Fizzles (New York: Grove Press, 1976). [Eight stories or "fizzles" numbered, not t.i.tled, in the American edition except for numbers 3, "Afar a bird"; 7, the only one originally written in English, "Still"; and 8, "For to end yet again," the t.i.tle story to the French and British editions, Pour finir encore et autre foirades and For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles, respectively. In addition, the latter two each print the stories in an order different from the Grove text.]

"For to End Yet Again," New Writing and Writers 17 (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1975 [or 1976 as Calder says]), 9-14.

For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1976). [Unlike the American and French editions, the British edition adopts t.i.tles for all eight of the stories: "For to end yet again," "Still," "He is barehead," "Horn came always," "Afar a Bird," "I gave up before birth," "Closed place" (mistakenly ent.i.tled "Closed s.p.a.ce" in this volume-"Se Voir" in French), and "Old earth." Moreover, each edition, American, British, and French, presents the stories in a different order.]

Four Novellas (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1977). [Includes: "First Love," "The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End." "First Love" is then finally grouped here with the three other stories from Stories and Texts for Nothing or No's Knife.]

"From an Abandoned Work," Trinity News: A Dublin University Weekly, 3 (7 July 1956): 4.

"From an Abandoned Work," Evergreen Review 1.3 (1957): 83-91.

From an Abandoned Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). [First broadcast by the BBC in the Third Programme on 14 December 1957, spoken by Patrick Magee.]

"From an Abandoned Work," Breath and Other Shorts (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 39-48.

"From an Abandoned Work," First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974).

"From an Unabandoned Work," Evergreen Review 4.14 (September-October 1960): 58-65. [A portion of the novel How It Is.]

"Heard in the Dark 1," New Writing and Writers 17 (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1979). [An early extract from the novel Company.]

"Heard in the Dark 2," Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 5 (autumn 1979). [As above.]

"L'Image," X: A Quarterly Review 1.1 (November 1959): 35-37. ["An extract written on the way to Comment c'est" (How It Is). See "A Note on the Texts" and see also James Knowlson's letter to The Times (23 May 1988).]

"Imagination Dead Imagine," Evergreen Review 10.39 (February 1966): 48-49.

"Imagination Dead Imagine," Sunday Times, 7 November 1965, p. 48.

Imagination Dead Imagine, (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1965). [The "Other Works" page announces a forthcoming volume as Stories and Texts for Nothing, but the volume with the addition of four more stories is finally published by Calder as No's Knife, q.v.]

"Imagination Dead Imagine," Evergreen Review 10.39 (February 1966): 48-49.

"Imagination Dead Imagine," First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974). [Reprinted in I can't go on, I'll go on, ed. by Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 551-54.]

"Imagination Dead Imagine," Samuel Beckett Reader, ed. by John Calder (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), 186-89.

"Jem Higgins' Love-Letter to the Alba," New Durham (June 1965): 10-11. [Fragment of Dream of Fair to Middling Women]

"Lessness," The Evergreen Review 14.80 (July 1970): 35-36.

Lessness (Signature Series: Signature 9) (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970).

"Lessness," I can't go on, I'll go on, ed. by Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 555-61.

The Lost Ones (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972). [Written in 1966, between "Enough" and "Ping," final paragraph added in 1970.]

The Lost Ones (New York: Grove Press, 1972). [As above.]

No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1966 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, reprinted 1975). [Three "stories"-"The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End,"-the 13 Texts for Nothing, and four Residua-"From an Abandoned Work," "Enough," "Imagination Dead Imagine," and "Ping."]

"One Evening," Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 6 (autumn 1980). [An early version of the novel Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said.)]

"One Evening," New Writers and Writing 20 (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1983).

"One Evening," art press, No. 51 (September 1981): 4.

"Ping," Encounter 28.2 (February 1967): 25-26. [Facsimile of ma.n.u.script version of "Bing," Richard L. Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Ma.n.u.scripts: A Study (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 132-48.]

"Ping," First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974).

"Return to the Vestry," New Review (August-September-October 1931): 98-99.

"Sedendo et Quiescendo," transition: An International Workshop for Orphic Creation 21 (March 1932): 13-20. [Fragment of Dream of Fair to Middling Women printed as "Sedendo et Quiesciendo."]

Six Residua (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1978). [Includes: "From an Abandoned Work," "Enough," "Imagination Dead Imagine," "Ping," "Lessness," and The Lost Ones.]

"The Smeraldina's Billet-Doux," Zero Anthology of Literature and Art, No. 8, ed. Themistocles Hoetis (New York: Zero Press, 1956), 56-61. [One of the More p.r.i.c.ks Than Kicks stories.]

"Sounds," Essays in Criticism 28.2 (April 1978): 156-57. [Along with "Still 3," a variant on "Still."]

"Still," Signature Anthology: Signature 20 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975).

"Still 3," Essays in Criticism 28.2 (April 1978): 156-57. [Along with "Sounds," a variant on "Still."]

"Stirrings Still," The Guardian, 3 March 1989: 25.

Stirrings Still (New York: North Star Line, 1993).

Stories and Texts for Nothing, with drawings by Avigdor Arikha (New York: Grove Press, 1967). [Three "stories": "The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End." The Arikha drawings appeared in the second French edition (1958) and the first American edition. The British edition of these stories published in No's Knife does not reproduce the Arikha drawings.]

"Text," New Review (winter 1931-32): 338-39. [Poem from The European Caravan, to be distinguished from "Text" below.]

"Text," New Review 2 (April 1932): 57. [Reprinted in Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 340. Fragment of Dream of Fair to Middling Women.]

"Text for Nothing I," Evergreen Review 3.9 (summer 1959): 21-24.

"Texts for Nothing VI," The London Magazine (New Series) 7.5 (August 1967): 47-50.

"Texts for Nothing XII," The Transatlantic Review 24 (spring 1967): XX.

Texts for Nothing (Signature Series: Signature 21) (London: Calder and Bo-yars, 1974). [The only separately published edition of these stories. See also No's Knife above.]

"Yellow," New World Writing 10 (November 1956): 108-119. [One of the More p.r.i.c.ks Than Kicks stories.]

[The following are designated as excerpts and not as separate stories: Portions of Watt have appeared in Envoy: A Review of Literature and Art 1.2 (January 1950); Irish Writing 17 (December 1951) and 22 (March 1953); and Merlin 1.3 (winter 1952-53). Portions from Beckett's "Trilogy" have appeared as follows: Molloy, Transition Fifty 6 (1950); Paris Review 5 (spring 1954); New World Writing No. 5 (April 1954); Malone Dies, transition (1950), Irish Writing 34 (1954); The Unnamable, Spectrum 2.1 (winter 1958); Chicago Review 12.2 (summer 1958); The Texas Quarterly 1.2 (spring 1958).]

Ill.u.s.trated Editions of Short Prose.

All Strange Away, with ill.u.s.trations by Edward Gorey (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1976). [An edition authorized for the Estate of Jack MacGowran.]

Au loin un oiseau [Afar a bird], with etchings by Avigdor Arikha (New York: Double Elephant Press, 1973).

Bing (Ping), with ill.u.s.trations by H. M. Erhardt (Stuttgart: Ma.n.u.s Presse, 1970). [8 blind-relief impressions in an edition of 50 numbered copies. Erhardt also produced ill.u.s.trations for Ma.n.u.s Presse of "Act Without Words" I and II (1965), "Come and Go" (1968), and Watt (1971).]