Beckett before Godot by John Pilling (review)

Abstract

Reacting against the impulse to canonize Lewis, the author is too much the American progressive to understand or sympathize with Lewis's militant antiprogressivism or some of his now unfashionable attitudes, and can hit him over the knuckles for them. This neglects Lewis the theologian (there is no chapter here with that theme or title) and his profoundity as one of the major critics of our modern illusions and presumptions, as a prophet who predicted our present discontents. For all this, the book has the merits of a long labour of love, and the great wealth of textual comment and bibliographical reference make it a very useful volume, indispensable to the study of Lewis and his work. UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM SHERIDAN GILLEY Beckett beforeGodot. ByJOHN PILLING. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xiv + 277 pp. ?37.50; $59.95. To write successfully about failure demands a special insight into the artistic process. John Pilling takes on this challenge in his newest study, BeckettbeforeGodot.In an area already much documented by other critics and by Pilling himself, he sets out to examine how almost two decades of early failure (I929-46) shaped the work of a great artist who used them to hone his expressive medium. Pilling's book has thirteen chapters which, apart from the introduction and conclusion, move steadily through Beckett's early writing (criticism, poetry, reviews, and fiction), focusing on various conjunctions of texts in a roughly chronological sequence. Such an approach allows an insight into the logic of Beckett's later innovative approaches to form: 'In maturity Beckett had ample opportunity to discover that trial and experiment, once begun, possessed a kind of unstoppable momentum which would never end' (p. 3). This study makes a contribution to our understanding of Beckett through its sensitive use of archival resources, its resistance to the usual temptations of hindsight, and its cool yet sympathetic judgement of the early writing. As Pilling's study reveals in meticulous detail, Beckett's development as a writer of global influence was extremely slow. Negative comments from publishers (including the revealing responses of Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus), anguished letters from Beckett to his friends, and obvious flaws in the writings themselves give support to the reality of Beckett's sense of failure, which, even if he later called it 'vivifying' (p. 230), may have been inhibiting at the time. Pilling is perfectly placed to draw on archival and biographical material, given his involvement as co-director of the Beckett International Foundation which enriches his handling of unpublished and recently published material. The treatment of the early works strives to look at each without 'reading in' later developments. Today it is too easy to read the work prior to Godot with the comfortable belief that all Beckett's false trails, his oddly-formed prose texts and difficult poems, were leading somewhere extraordinary. Yet, as Pilling shows, there was no certainty in either their making or their reception up to 1946, by which time Beckett was already forty years old: All hisworkin book formwas eitherout ofprint [... ] or had only ever been availablein very small limited editions. Everything else Beckett had published, in magazines in London, Dublin, Parisand elsewhere, he had either already discounted andjettisoned, or had come to see as merejuvenilia. There was a growing amount of what Beckettwould latercall 'trunk material',butlittle likelihoodof any of it ever seeing the light of day. (p. 228) This book will appeal most, I suspect, to the experienced Beckett scholar rather than to the newcomer. Its achievement is to take the reader back to those pre-Godot Reacting against the impulse to canonize Lewis, the author is too much the American progressive to understand or sympathize with Lewis's militant antiprogressivism or some of his now unfashionable attitudes, and can hit him over the knuckles for them. This neglects Lewis the theologian (there is no chapter here with that theme or title) and his profoundity as one of the major critics of our modern illusions and presumptions, as a prophet who predicted our present discontents. For all this, the book has the merits of a long labour of love, and the great wealth of textual...