Dream of Fair to Middling Women (3 page)

In the same way we have been faithful to his use of italics, none where none intended. Wisely, because of the profusion of various languages, Samuel Beckett desisted from applying to foreign words the usual italics which he reserved solely for the purpose of emphasis.

The manuscript we relied upon was the original one in Dartmouth College, which had been typed and corrected by Samuel Beckett, though the Reading copy, which was not transcribed by him and differs from the Dartmouth original in minor respects, was also consulted.

Whatever the scholastic merits or demerits of
Dream
are judged to be, in introducing the book sixty years after it was written, we do so knowing that it will bring considerable wealth to many, perhaps especially to youth, for the book has not aged and it is a book of humour and sensitivity, of hope and music, much music.
Dream
can be read at two levels at least. Continuing the musical analogy, the reader can simply hum the tune and the air is a catching one, or he can, if he has the mind to do it, study the music
and fail not to be enthralled. It is also a book of colour, pervaded by Samuel Beckett's technique of invoking colour to heighten mood with a unique chromatic intensity.

A special word of thanks to Jérôme Lindon who made this undertaking possible, to Paul Bennett who patiently withstood our numerous typesetting changes, to the Board of Black Cat Press, most especially Ted and Ursula O'Brien, and Tona, each of whom understood the importance of
Dream.
I am also indebted to Kevin and Kate Cahill, Caroline Murphy and Edward Beckett, John Calder, the Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire and the Beckett Archive, Reading University. In their different ways all participated in bringing this prodigal novel to awakefulness.

Eoin O'Brien,
Seapoint,
June 1992

DREAM OF FAIR
to middling
WOMEN

A thousand sythes have I herd men telle, That ther is joye in heven, and peyne in helle; But—

Geoffrey Chaucer

Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater's van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat wet rump of the hoss. Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah…!

And what is more he is to be surprised some years later climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium.

Belacqua sat on the stanchion at the end of the Carlyle Pier in the mizzle in love from the girdle up with a slob of a girl called Smeraldina-Rima whom he had encountered one evening when as luck would have it he happened to be tired and her face more beautiful than stupid. His fatigue on that fatal occasion making him attentive to her face only, and that part of her shining as far as he could make out with an unearthly radiance, he had so far forgotten himself as to cast all over and moor in the calm curds of her bosom which he had rashly deduced from her features that left nothing but death to be desired as one that in default of Abraham's would do very nicely to be going on with in this frail world that is all temptation and knighthood. Then ere he could see through his feeling for her she mentioned that she cared for nothing in heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth so much as the music of Bach and that she was taking herself off almost at once and for good and all to Vienna to study the pianoforte. The result of this was that the curds put forth suckers of sargasso, and enmeshed him.

So now he sagged on the stanchion in the grateful mizzle after the supreme adieu, his hands in a jelly in his
lap, his head drooped over his hands, pumping up the little blirt. He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched off his mind and let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind till it thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a second too soon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gush was quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He found that the best way to turn over the piston in the first instance was to think of the béret that she had snatched off to wave when the ship began to draw clear. The sun had bleached it from green to a very poignant reseda and it had always, from the very first moment he clapped eyes on it, affected him as being a most shabby, hopeless and moving article. It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell. The least reference of his thought now to these valedictory jerks, the monstrous grief in the hand clutching the livid béret like a pestle and pounding up and down, so that every stroke of the stiff arm seemed to bray his heart and propel her out of his sight, was enough to churn his mind into the requisite strom of misery. He found this out after a few false starts. So, having fixed the technique, he sat on working himself up to the little teary ejaculation, choking it back in the very act of emission, waiting with his mind blank for it to subside, and then when everything was in order switching on the tragic béret and the semaphore vale and starting all over again. He sat hunched on the stanchion in the evening mizzle, forcing and foiling the ebullition in this curious
way, and his hands were two clammy cadaverous slabs of cod in his lap. Until to his annoyance the fetish of her waving the béret in the manner we (concensus, here and hereafter, of me) have been at such pains to describe, refused to work. He switched on as usual, after the throttling and expunction, and nothing happened. The cylinders of his mind abode serene. That was a nasty one for him if you like, a complete break down of the works like that. He cast round in a kind of panic for some image that would do to start things moving again: a Rasima look in her sunken eyes towards the end of the evening, the dim fanlight of the brow under the black hair growing low and thickly athwart the temples, the dell at the root of the nose that she used to allow him to palp and probe with his forefinger pad and nail. And all to no purpose. His mind abode serene and the well of tears dry.

No sooner had he admitted to himself that there was nothing to be done, that he had dried himself quite with this chamber-work of sublimation, than he was seized with a pang of the darkest dye, and his Smeraldinalgia was swallowed up immediately in the much greater affliction of being a son of Adam and cursed with an insubordinate mind. His mind instructed his hands now to stop being clammy and flabby in his lap and to try a little fit of convulsions, and they obeyed instanter; but when it instructed itself to pump up a few tears in respect of the girl who had left him behind her, then it resisted. That was a very dark pang. Still on the stanchion in the mizzle that would not abate until everybody had gone home, wringing his hands faute de mieux, mindless of the Smeraldina-Rima, he pored over this new sorrow.

Meanwhile a cobalt devil of a very much less light and airy high and mighty description was biding its time
until the Adam grievance should have shot its bolt as all Belacqua's grievances did, leaving him in a disarmed condition that was most disagreeable. For him the Great Dereliction was the silver lining and its impertinent interventions. For the mind to pore over a woe or in deference to a woe be blacked out was all right; and of course for the mind to be enwombed and entombed in the very special manner that we will have more than one occasion to consider was better still, a real pleasure. But this impudent interpolation of the world's ghastly backside, dismantling his machinery of despond and hauling him high and dry out of his comfortable trough, was a solution of continuity that he objected to particularly.

Not that he could complain that the texture of the current dejection had been seriously faulted in this respect. There had been no lull of any consequence between the break down of the love-ache and the onset of the pang. Indeed whatever little interspace there was had been filled by an ergo, the two terms had been chained together beautifully. And now in the very process of his distress at being a son of Adam and afflicted in consequence with a mind that would not obey its own behests was being concocted a gloom to crown his meditation in a style that had never graced the climax of any similar series in his previous experience of melancholy. A positively transcendental gloom was brewing that would incorporate the best and choicest elements in all that had gone before and made its way straight in what at first sight would have the appearance of a conclusive proposition. Needless to say it would be nothing of the kind. But considered in the penumbra of a clause on which to toss and turn and whinge himself to sleep it could scarcely have been improved on.

He was still grinding away at No. 2, with the hands
back in the lap in a pulp, when suddenly the impression that there was a rough gritty man standing before him and stating what sounded unpleasantly like an ultimatum caused him to look up. It was only too true. It was the wharfinger, seeking whom he might devour. Belacqua gave heed to what was being said to him, and elicited in the end from an exuberance of coprolalia that the man was requiring him to go.

“Get off my pier” said the wharfinger rudely “and let me get home to my tea.” This seemed fair enough. It even seemed natural enough to Belacqua that the man should speak of the pier as his. In a sense it was his pier. He was responsible for it. That was what he was there for. That was what he was paid for. And it was very natural that he should want to get home to his tea after his day's work.

“To be sure” said Belacqua, rising from the stanchion, “how thoughtless of me. May I…” He felt in his trouser pocket for a sixpenny bit or failing that a shilling, and pulled out all that he had left—twopence. Belacqua stood hatless in the mizzle before his adversary, the foreskirt of his reefer flung back, and the discoloured lining of the pocket protruded like we cannot think what. It was a very embarrassing moment.

“May you what?” said the wharfinger.

Belacqua blushed. He did not know where to look. He took off his glasses in his confusion. But of course it was a case of locking the stable-door after the steed had flown. Dare he offer such a heated man twopence?

“I can only apologise” he stammered “for having put you to this inconvenience. Believe me, I had no idea…”

The wharfinger spat. No smoking was allowed on the pier but spitting was different.

“Be off my pier” he said with finality “before that spit dries.”

Belacqua thought what an extraordinary expression for a man in his station to use. The phrase was misapplied, he thought, surely something was wrong with the phrase somewhere. And in such weather it was like inviting him to postpone his going till the Greek Kalends. These conceits passed through his mind as he walked rapidly landward down the wharf with his oppressor hard on his heels. When the gate had slammed safely behind him he turned round and wished the wharfinger a courteous good-evening. To his surprise the man touched his cap and replied with quite a courteous little good-evening. Belacqua's heart gave a great leap of pleasure.

“Oh” he cried “good-evening to you and forgive me, my good man, won't you, I meant no harm.”

But to acknowledge an obvious gentleman's courtly greeting was one thing and to pooh-pooh offhand a flagrant act of trespass was quite another. So the wharfinger hardened his heart and disappeared into his hut and Belacqua had no choice but to hobble away on his ruined feet without indulgence, absolution or remission.

God bless dear Daddy,
he prayed vaguely that night for no particular reason before getting into bed,
Mummy Johnny Bibby
(quondam Nanny, now mother of thousands by a gardener)
and all that I love and make me a good boy for Jesus Christ sake Armen.

That was the catastasis their Mammy had taught them, first John, then Bel, at her knee, when they were tiny. That was their prayer. What came after that was the Lord's. Their prayer was a nice little box and the Lord's
was a dull big box. You went down in a lift and your only stomach rose up into your craw. Oooaaah.

He got up and got into bed and the blue devil that had been waiting for just such an opportunity got in beside him and represented to him there and then and in the most insidious terms that it was a nice state of affairs when the son of Adam could quash the lover of the Smeraldina-Rima or any other girl for that matter and if that was all being in love with a girl from the girdle up meant to him the sooner he came off it the better. Thus he was crowned in gloom and he had a wonderful night. He groped, as one that walks by moonshine in a wood, through the grateful night to the impertinent champaign of the morning. Sin is behovable but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
Inquit Grock…

A low capital in the crypt of the Basilica Saint-Sernin in the most beautiful city of Toulouse is carved to represent a rat gnawing its way into a globe. The Dutch cheese of La Fontaine's fable of the catawampus that withdrew from the cares of this world? We think not.

The fact of the matter is we do not quite know where we are in this story. It is possible that some of our creatures will do their dope all right and give no trouble. And it is certain that others will not. Let us suppose that Nemo is one of those that will not. John, most of the parents, the Smeraldina-Rima, the Syra-Cusa, the Alba, the Mandarin, the Polar Bear, Lucien, Chas, are a few of those that will, that stand, that is, for something or can be made to stand for something. It is to be hoped that we can make them stand for something. Whereas it is almost certain that
Nemo cannot be made, at least not by us, stand for anything.
He simply is not that kind of person.

Supposing we told now a little story about China in order to orchestrate what we mean. Yes? Lîng-Liûn then, let us say, went to the confines of the West, to Bamboo Valley, and having cut there a stem between two knots and blown into same was charmed to constate that it gave forth the sound of his own voice when he spoke, as he mostly did, without passion. From this the phœnix male had the kindness to sing six notes and the phoenix female six other notes and Lîng-Liûn the minister cut yet eleven stems to correspond with all that he had heard. Then he remitted the twelve liû-liū to his master, the six liū male phœnix and the six liû female phœnix: the Yellow Bell, let us say, the Great Liu, the Great Steepleiron, the Stifled Bell, the Ancient Purification, the Young Liū, the Beneficient Fecundity, the Bell of the Woods, the Equable Rule, the Southern Liū, the Imperfect, the Echo Bell.