Beckett Before Godot by John Pilling Cambridge 277pp, £37.50 in UK
After the biographies (four in number - three weighty, one disposable) we now have a critical study fully informed by the biographical findings and all the better for such information. The jacket carries an enthusiastic endorsement from James Knowlson (the "authorised" biographer), Pilling's professional colleague at the University of Reading and a fellow director of the Beckett International Foundation. In the old days this was called logrolling but in the present instance is probably indicative of how thin the population is in certain compartments of the Beckett industry.
Pilling divides Beckett's pre-Godot career (the word is excessive) as a writer into three periods. The first begins in 1929 with Beckett's appearance as critic and short-story writer in the pages of transition, continues with his extraordinary monograph on Proust (published in 1931) and concludes with what Pilling calls the "wild and extravagant" novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932 - withheld from the public gaze for sixty years. Pilling wisely uses the Black Cat edition as his text instead of the deplorable Anglo-American one currently available, for which there is nothing to be said nor anything too strong to be said against.
With almost total consistency throughout this fine study, Pilling resists the temptation to read Beckett in terms set by his later and better work. A case in point is his commentary on Proust, usually read as an early dry run for Beckett's major thematic concerns. Pilling's analysis homes in on Beckett's rhetorical strategies and the quasi-academic manner in which he deploys them. What emerges from this analysis is an image of the young Beckett impatient and frustrated by the academic enterprise and provocatively dismissive of the prevailing canons of fiction. Within months of finishing the monograph Beckett was labouring away on Dream, which may be wild and extravagant but (to my remains of mind) is merely overcooked, more thickened coddle than clear consomme. Its indigestibility arises from the overload of ingredients and the fact that Beckett was far too heavy-handed with the Joyce sauce.
Pilling's second period runs from 1932 to the completion of Murphy in 1936. Again, Pilling is both subtle and penetrating on the almost impenetrable poetry Beckett wrote at this time and on the shifts he was driven to in order to salvage More Pricks than Kicks from the ruins of Dream. Beckett's brief period as an immodest and corrosive book reviewer is assessed, but the main focus is on Murphy, published in 1938. Much of what Pilling has to say about the novel is to the point but there are many other points to be made about it that fall outside the compass of his rather tight focus.
Pilling understandably bemoans the fact that the six manuscript notebooks leading to Murphy are in private hands in England and not available to scholars. Blessed is the scholar who needs to see materials in American archives because copies will be posted to you at 10 cents a page. Requests for copies at British archives are more likely to be met with a polite smile of refusal - the stiffness of the upper lip may really be a rictus of retentive strain. In the easily imaginable future all the archives involved should scan their materials into one great database to which we can log on without leaving our wrist-rests.
The final period in Pilling's account runs from 1937 to 1946 and covers the protracted composition of Watt and the fitful transfer into French which finally produced Mercier et Camier and the four nouvelles and in which Beckett found, at last, his voice and his method. Pilling's Beckett is limned as a writer whose work "fizzes and fizzles", who struggled with "an itch to make" but had few clear ideas as to what he wanted to make, who persisted in continuing, in going on. Professor Pilling's book is not the last word but in many important ways is the first.
Gerry Dukes is an academic and critic