Sir, – The recent publication of Echo's Bones by Samuel Beckett has been hailed as a commendable achievement by Denis Donoghue ("Samuel Beckett's forgotten story", Weekend Review, May 24th). I feel that in fairness to Samuel Beckett, who was a dear friend, a contrary view needs to be expressed.
Denis Donoghue has recounted the history of Echo's Bones in detail. Briefly, Beckett's first collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, was accepted for publication by Chatto & Windus in 1933. Charles Prentice, the senior partner at the publisher, suggested to Beckett that the work might benefit from an additional climatic vignette. This was not a simple request as the protagonist, Belacqua, had been very decisively killed off in the penultimate chapter, "Yellow", when the physicians tending to his minor ailment in a Dublin nursing home "had clean forgotten to auscultate him!" and he is assuredly laid to rest in final chapter, which unequivocally declares Belacqua "dead and buried". Nonetheless, Beckett obliged his publisher with an additional story entitled Echo's Bones in which he fantasises about the goings-on of Belacqua et al in a less-than-convincing phantasmagorical after-life. Prentice was horrified and wrote to Beckett warning that not alone would the story "lose the book a great many readers", but he regarded it moreover as "a nightmare" that gave him "the jim-jams". He even explained his rejection with a frankness that is refreshing: "People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won't be keen on analysing the shudder."
The young writer was offended by this rebuttal – initially, that is – and he nicknamed his publisher "Shatupon And Windup". However, having thought about it, he was glad to see More Pricks than Kicks published as originally submitted and he then discarded the text of the rejected chapter and transferred the title to the poem Echo's Bones, which is an exquisite expression of the dilemma that was then facing him as an artist searching for his means of expression. This should be affirmation enough that Beckett did not wish to see the title of the poem confused with the earlier story, but even more telling in this regard is the fact that all along the years since 1933, Beckett never sought to have the rejected additional chapter included in More Pricks than Kicks on the occasions when that book was several times reprinted or published elsewhere.
In my many discussions with Beckett on the publication of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he described as "the chest" into which he threw his "wild thoughts", and which he agreed should be published "some little time" after his death, he never ever mentioned Echo's Bones as a work in need of similar consideration.
There has been laudatory comment on the achievement of Mark Nixon, who edited the publication of Echo's Bones, both by Donoghue and other reviewers, such as John Banville (New Statesman April 28th) but this is, with respect, an irrelevant observation. The issue is simply this: does the essay, Echo's Bones, merit publication as a writing befitting one of the greatest literary figures of this century?
Banville, in fairness, while acknowledging the literary scholarship, which he finds "in its way more fascinating, and certainly more enlightening, than the story the intricacies of which it aims to unravel" does recognise the banality of the piece: "Most readers" he writes, "will find it tiresome or infuriating or both." It is difficult to reconcile this assessment with Donoghue's bland acceptance of its literary merit in that he fails to see what made the prescient "Prentice shudder". Regrettably, the publication of Echo's Bones would also make its author shudder. – Yours, etc,
EOIN O’BRIEN,
Clifton Terrace,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.