Samuel Beckett's 'More Pricks Than Kicks': In A Strait Of Two Wills (Historicizing Modernism) by John Pilling

Author:John Pilling [Pilling, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum UK
Published: 2011-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

How It Went in the World

1. The Early Reviews

Federman and Fletcher’s bibliography lists seven reviews of More Pricks on its publication in 1934, with some well-known names, either of the time or later – Arthur Calder-Marshall, Gerald Gould, Peter Quennell – sitting in immediate judgement on an author virtually unknown in literary London, and only known to people in the Joyce circle in literary Paris. Two of these reviews are reprinted in the Graver and Federman Critical Heritage collection (42–4), one by the poet and critic Edwin Muir (originally printed in the Listener, 4 July 1934), the other by the anonymous reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement (26 July 1934), identified as Alex Glendinning by Derwent May (201). Both of these reviews show that the book need not have been the publishing disaster it turned out to be. Muir acknowledges that it is ‘very difficult to describe’, but credits Beckett with ‘a subtle and entertaining mind’ and thinks that More Pricks is an ‘exploration’ which is ‘very much worth following’. Between these statements Muir writes: ‘The author has been influenced by Mr James Joyce, but the spirit in which he writes is rather that of Sterne’, showing ‘the particularity of both’, even if ‘he does not nearly come up to them’. Muir’s soft-pedalling of Joyce here could have been more profitably followed up by later commentators than has sometimes been the case (see Addenda 1).

In the TLS, Glendinning thought it an ‘odd book’, but also felt that there was a ‘definite, fresh talent at work in it’. He makes no mention of Sterne, but he discusses Joyce sensibly, and he has certainly done his homework:

Part of ‘Draff’ is transcribed from an earlier prose piece of Mr Beckett’s which appeared in Transition [‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’, March 1932] and showed strongly the influence of Mr Joyce’s latest work [Work in Progress] – a dangerous model. There is still more than the setting of Dubliners to remind us of this writer, but a comparison between the piece in Transition and the present book shows how much Mr Beckett’s work has gained from discipline of his verbal gusto.

Glendinning could hardly have been expected to see, amidst so much that remains unclear in ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’, that it was in essence an attempt on Beckett’s part to expel Joyce from his system, a necessary voiding if any real creative progress of his own was ever to be made. But the praise of ‘the chapter or episode which describes Belacqua in hospital [‘Yellow’]’ as ‘perfect in its way’ makes Glendinning’s judgement of More Pricks as ‘an uneven book . . . unlikely to appeal to a large audience’ look less damaging, even if the book was only to find a pitifully small audience. Glendinning effectively anticipates this by saying: ‘His book sometimes invites us to compare Mr Beckett with one of his characters [Walter Draffin, in ‘What A Misfortune’], an author, who thought out a very pretty joke but could find no one subtle enough to appreciate it’.

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