The Unnamable

After a war spent in hiding in the south of France, and a period spent working at
a Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô, Samuel Beckett returned to his apartment in Paris
at the beginning of 1946 to try, like so many others, to resume his life. He had been
writing for fifteen years and had to his name a short critical essay on Proust (1931),
a book of short stories (
More Pricks than Kicks,
1934), a volume of poems (
Echo’s Bones,
1935) and a novel (
Murphy
, 1938), of whose fortunes he had had no word during the war, and which he discovered
had been allowed to go out of print in 1943. He also had the manuscript of a novel
written in Roussillon, the wildly weird
Watt
, which began a long career of rejections by baffled publishers in 1946. If these
were not entirely inspiring prospects, there seemed no reason either why Beckett should
not be able to resume, on the same terms as before, his place as a minor participant
in the literary and artistic circles that were beginning to come back together in
Paris, eking out the allowance he received from his mother with work as a jobbing
reviewer and translator.

Two things occurred to change all this. The first was a
realisation
that suddenly came to Beckett, probably during a trip back to Ireland to visit his
family in May 1946, that the way for him to write might not involve trying to emulate
the
constellatory
omnicompetence of James Joyce, but rather exploring the opposite condition, of impotence,
ignorance and weakness. The second was the practical and philosophical enactment of
this renunciation as, returning to Paris, Beckett began writing, not in the English
of which he had made himself such a perplexing and exhibitionist virtuoso, but in
the French of his adopted country. This was not quite such an abrupt or overnight
decision
as is sometimes thought, for Beckett had in fact begun
writing in French before the war, producing a short critical essay (‘Les deux besoins’)
and a sequence of poems. More significantly, perhaps, he had also completed a translation
of his novel
Murphy
into French, partly in collaboration with his friend Alfred Péron, in 1940. Beckett
would speak often and consistently in later years of the salutary effects of writing
in a language which was less sumptuously stuffed with stylishness as English was,
for him at least. But it is likely that significant encouragement for his beginning
to write in French was also provided by the fact that, at the end of 1945, he had
signed a contract with the publisher Bordas for the French version of
Murphy
, along with all future work both in French and in English. In the event, Bordas would
show no interest in any of the work Beckett was to offer them over the next six years,
leading him eventually, and after some painful wrangling, to extract himself from
his contract with them in 1951; but the signing of the contract must initially have
provided a
considerable
boost to his sense of the possibility of being able to
establish
himself as a writer in French.

Whatever the impetus may have been, there then followed a remarkable torrent of writing
in French, beginning with four long stories or ‘nouvelles’, and another novel in French,
Mercier et Camier,
both of which were completed in 1946, and a play,
Eleuthéria
, written in a single month at the beginning of 1947. Then followed the sequence of
three novels of which
The Unnamable
is the culmination, all substantially completed over the next three years, along
with the play that would make Beckett suddenly famous,
En attendant Godot.

Molloy
was written in seven months, between 1 May and 1 November 1947. Its sequel,
Malone meurt
, was begun almost straight away, on 27 November, and completed six months later,
on 30 May 1948. A pause of ten months then ensued, and it seems clear that Beckett
had no thought of a third novel in the sequence at this point. He wrote to Thomas
MacGreevy in January 1948, referring to
Molloy
as the second last in a sequence of works beginning with
Murphy
, on the last of which
(
Malone meurt
) he was currently at work (Pilling 2006, p. 102). It was not until 29 March 1949
that Beckett began work on
L’Innommable
. His principal diversion during this lay-off was the writing of
En attendant Godot
, in a four-month streak between October 1948 and January 1949.

The third novel took longer than either of its predecessors. Beckett worked on his
first draft for nine months, from March 1949 to January 1950. Pressure of other commitments,
notably the translations he was preparing for the
Anthology of Mexican Poetry
that would eventually appear in English in 1958, kept him from completing
L’Innommable
until he took the manuscript with him to Ireland in June 1950, where he would remain
until September, typing it up. Meanwhile, his partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil,
had been active on his behalf, trying, in the absence of any interest from Bordas,
to interest the recently formed Éditions de Minuit in Beckett’s French novels, of
which there were now four in the queue:
Mercier et Camier, Molloy, Malone meurt
and
L’Innommable
.

That Beckett had come to think of the last three as forming a coherent sequence is
indicated by the fact that when he did eventually sign a contract with Minuit in November
1950 it was for publication as a whole of what would in time become known simply as
the Trilogy. However, the novels were published
separately
,
Molloy
in February 1951 and
Malone meurt
later that year, in November. There then followed almost a two-year gap before
L’Innommable
appeared in July 1953. It would sell 476 copies in the first year, a pretty decent
sale and one no doubt buoyed up by Beckett’s new fame as the author of
En attendant Godot
, which had premiered in January 1953.

The huge outpouring of work written in French from 1946 to 1950 had left Beckett with
the bleak aftermath of having to produce English translations, to catch up with himself.
Somewhat oddly, given that Beckett had not sought much
assistance
in writing or revising the original texts in French, his initial idea was to give
the job of turning his work into English to somebody else, and the young writer Patrick
Bowles was
selected for the task. But if this was the idea, it did not last long, for Beckett
was soon wrestling with the text alongside Bowles, working closely on each sentence.
The fact that Minuit announced that it expected Bowles to be Beckett’s translator
for two more years suggests that Beckett initially intended to collaborate with him
on translating all the novels in the Trilogy. But Beckett seems initially to have
found it more efficient, and less trying, for Bowles to produce first versions of
the text for him to work over, and subsequently, following the translation of
Molloy
, to take sole responsibility for later translations. Work on the translation of the
next novel in the sequence,
Malone meurt,
occupied him almost continuously for much of 1955, and he expected to be able to
begin work on translating
L’Innommable
the following year.

As with its original composition, translating
L’Innommable
gave Beckett much more trouble than the previous two novels in the sequence, tough
going though they had been. He began the job in March 1956, but then abandoned it.
He wrote guiltily to Thomas MacGreevy in July, telling him that he knew he should
be getting on with the translation, but that it was an impossible job. All the time,
new work was beginning to make demands, including of course further translating demands.
These were intensified by the fact that Beckett seems to have considered at this point
in his life that he might have to be responsible for the German translations of his
work as well: he had already worked closely with Erich Franzen on the German translation
of
Molloy
. By January 1957, the gloomy prospect lay before him of translating
All That Fall
, a radio play he had written in English for the BBC (and his first work in English
for over ten years), and of working on both the German and English translations of
the play
Fin de partie
and the German translations of
Malone meurt
and
Echo’s Bones.
Beckett
eventually
began to translate
L’Innommable
in his country cottage at Ussy in February 1957, but wrote in March to Aidan Higgins
that he doubted being able to complete it. Just as he had written the whole of
En attendant Godot
in the intermission between
Malone meurt
and
L’Innommable
, he now completed the English translation of
Fin de partie
into
Endgame
in a few weeks between May and June 1957. There was another protestation of the impossibility
of translating
L’Innommable
in a letter to Ethna MacCarthy in November, and he told Mary Hutchinson in December
that he had only got just beyond halfway through it. He resumed the task on 21 January
1958 and was able to complete a first draft by 23 February. Working on
The Unnamable
coincided with a bout of writing in English – first of all on his radio play
Embers
, and then on
Krapp’s Last Tape
, which, glimpsing the finishing line perhaps, he began three days before completing
the first draft of
The Unnamable
. But he would not complete the revision of the translation until June 1958, more
than two years after he had started on it, the
translation
thus taking twice as long as writing the novel in French in the first place.

Where the original manuscript notebooks of
L’Innommable
suggest that that text was composed easily, with few revisions, the three exercise
books and subsequent typescript in which Beckett worked on his translation (held in
the Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas) show frequent deletions,
insertions
and revisions (Admussen 1979, pp. 60, 86–7). More than was the case with the preceding
two works of the Trilogy, Beckett seems to have seen in the translation process an
opportunity
to make a considerable number of small but sometimes significant adjustments to the
original, with the result that the English
Unnamable
is a rather different text from the French. This is apparent from the outset, where
Beckett decides to change the order of the questions that open the text, ‘Où
maintenant
? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (Beckett 1971, p. 7) being rendered (somewhat
less logically?) as ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 293). Beckett
was even uncertain to begin with about how to render the title into English, and we
should certainly be grateful that he decided against the idea he briefly entertained
of calling it
Beyond Words
(Admussen 1979, p. 87). A particularly large class of revisions
involves what Beckett will later in
Worstward Ho
call ‘
worsening
’, the disimproving in various ways of his speaker’s
predicament
, or intensification of his reaction to it. The annoyance at ‘me trouver sur un terrain
si peu solide’ is sharpened to ‘having to flounder in such muck’ (Beckett 1959b, p.
326). The
inoffensive
‘Histoires …’ becomes ‘balls about being and existing’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 351). Sometimes
a phrase is omitted from the English translation for the purposes of weakening (though
the effect is unlikely to be detectable to any but a reader aware of what has been
omitted): the sentence ‘for now we must speak, and speak of Worm’ is made to do without
the last reassurance that the French seems to give itself – ‘il faut le pouvoir’ (‘it
must be possible’). The sequence ‘no vegetables, no minerals’ is
similarly
truncated, dropping the ‘pas d’animaux’ of the French. ‘[M]y inexistence in the eyes
of those who are not in the know’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 347) ratchets up the simple ‘existence’
of the French. Beckett also often takes the opportunity to sharpen comic incongruity,
for example in the opening words of the text in which the aside ‘premier pas va’,
for which the straight-forward translation ‘first step taken’ would have held no surprises
(though it would have sacrificed the play between the two meanings of
pas
, ‘not’ and ‘step’), but is rendered in the queerly lurching ‘off it goes on’ (Beckett
1959b, p. 293). In the English text, Mahood’s wife announces to her children, of her
approaching one-legged husband, ‘Oh look children, he’s down on his hands and knee’
(Beckett 1959b, p. 321), which gives a grotesque exactitude to the unexceptional but
anatomically incorrect ‘il est à genoux’ of the French. Sometimes the move to greater
specificity is harder to account for; the speaker describes himself halting at intervals
to rub his stump not just with ‘du baume tranquille’, but with ‘Elliman’s Embrocation’
(Beckett 1959b, p. 323). The protest that ‘it’s not my turn … my turn to live’ renders
‘mon tour de vie’ as ‘my turn of the life-screw’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 403), thereby
veritably imparting another turn of the screw to the original formulation. The cumulative
result is an English text that seems (again if only to the
comparing
eye) angrier, more pained and more bitterly
uncompromising
than the French, and with greater and more sardonic switches of register (‘c’est
un beau rêve que je viens de faire là, un excellent rêve’ – ‘that’s a darling dream
I’ve been having, a broth of a dream’ [Beckett 1959b, p. 382]).

One is able to see the process of transformation sometimes in the three early excerpts
from the ongoing translation that Beckett published during 1958 in
Texas Quarterly, Chicago Review
and
Spectrum
(Beckett 1958a, 1958b, 1958c). The version of the first five paragraphs that appeared
in the winter 1958 issue of
Spectrum
, for example, tells us that ‘there will not be much on the subject of Malone, from
whom there is nothing more to be expected’ (Beckett 1958c, p. 4), which is not too
far away from ‘il sera peu question de Malone, de qui il n’y a plus rien à attendre’
(Beckett 1971, p. 9). The final version of the text darkens this slightly, but perceptibly,
to ‘from whom there is nothing further to be hoped’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 294). Other
small changes move us from the relative plainness of the French to the slightly stickler-ish
precision of the English, perhaps reversing a little the weakening that Beckett sought
in writing in French. In the
Spectrum
version, Malone appears ‘always at the same distance’ (Beckett 1958c, p. 6) – ‘à
la même distance’ (Beckett 1971, p. 12) – but, in the final text, ‘at the same remove’
(Beckett 1959b, p. 296); a little later ‘I hope I may have occasion to come back to
this question’ – ‘J’espère que j’aurai l’occasion de revenir sur ce question’ (Beckett
1971, p. 12) – evolves into the slightly more bureaucratic ‘I hope I may have occasion
to revert to this question’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 6).