Seamus Deane
Belacqua Returns
‘Echo’s Bones’, as the editor Mark Nixon tells us, was received by Samuel Beckett’s editor at Chatto & Windus when he asked Beckett to add to his collection of short stories More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), all ten of which were short indeed, individually and cumulatively. ‘Hooray too if you can manage that extra story,’ the editor, Charles Prentice, told him. Prentice had already rejected Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in 1932. He was a perceptive and courageous editor, but even his almost surreal politeness did not prevent him from responding to the receipt of ‘Echo’s Bones’ with a horrified candour. ‘It is a nightmare … It gives me the jim-jams … I am sorry, for I hate to be dense, but I hope I am not altogether insensitive. “Echo’s Bones” certainly did land me with a wallop
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