Why I ❤️ Samuel Beckett's "More Pricks Than Kicks"

The Books We ❤️ Club welcomes Jeffrey Streeter of The English Republic of Letters

I understood from the book of essays Multiple Joyce by David Collard that the young Samuel Beckett, who served as James Joyce’s assistant while he was writing Finnegans Wake, started out wishing to emulate the great man but ended up reversing course and striking out in a distinctly more minimalist direction.

“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can,” he said.

So if your primary point of reference for Beckett is Waiting for Godot, then you may find yourself in somewhat more fecund territory with More Pricks Than Kicks, his first full-length book.

I’m always delighted when guest writers introduce an author with whom I’m unfamiliar, and Jeffrey Streeter this month has provided one of singular significance. Never having met a gateway drug I didn’t like, I confess myself daunted by his selection.

Still, as Jeffrey signs off every email with—

"I can no other answer make but thanks,
And thanks; and ever thanks.”

Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 3.

—I will return the same favor to him: Thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks, good sir.

We hope you enjoy this exploration of Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, a provocative title if there ever was one.

~ MTF

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The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

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NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ Georges Simenon” with

Martine Proctor

of

The Roll Top Desk

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To kick against the pricks

by

Jeffrey Streeter

of

English Republic of Letters

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The source for the title of Samuel Beckett’s first lengthy published work, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), a collection of ten stories, seems to have been the King James Version of the bible, in which the phrase “It’s hard to kick against the pricks” is used (Acts 26:14). The pricks in question were those of ox goads, “a stick with a pointed piece of iron on its tip used to prod the oxen when plowing.” The word “goads” is apparently used in other versions. But “More Goads Than Kicks” probably doesn’t have the same ring to it.

A smallish portion of the book is made up of the flotsam and jetsam from the wreckage of Beckett’s first attempt at a novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932). The book was rejected by every publisher he sent it to. After he became famous, Beckett refused to allow anyone to publish it. Affectionately described by one recent blogger as “unreadable twaddle,” it’s not hard to see why this is one of the author’s most neglected works. Beckett had more luck, eventually, with More Pricks Than Kicks, when Chatto and Windus (“Shatton and Windup,” to him) agreed to take it on.

I came to the book in my late teens, already familiar with Waiting for Godot (first performed in 1953), which I’d studied at school, and after I’d read Beckett’s most famous novel, Molloy (1951).

To those more accustomed to Beckett’s later minimalist style (example: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” From Worstward Ho! (1983), More Pricks Than Kicks comes as a surprise with its wordy exuberance. If characters in the later texts need to be prodded with a sharp stick to make them speak (there we go with the goads again), you’ve a job to shut them up in More Pricks Than Kicks. To use the word of the narrator in one of the stories, Fingal, Beckett here is “unsluiced.”

The tone of the book is poised between that of James Joyce and the deliciously funny Flann O’Brien, which makes for a rather narrow path to stumble along, one probably no wider than the famous Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey. But it somehow gives Beckett enough space to have plenty of fun. If the characters sometimes take themselves very seriously—for instance Belacqua in Dante and the Lobster—the writing doesn’t. And this is a key feature. Without this boisterous and self-effacing levity, the frequent references to literature, art, and philosophy—from Dante to Swift, from Dürer to Plato—would be heavy indeed.

Someone once said of TS Eliot’s earlier essays that he wrote like a young man who knew he was bright and yet was also aware hadn’t yet done all the reading, and the same seems to apply to Beckett here. The intellectual name-dropping is a little too self-conscious. The narrator of A Wet Night tells us that The Polar Bear, “a big old brilliant lecher” and also apparently a Jesuit, “never used the English word when the foreign pleased him better.” One might say the same of Beckett in these stories.

As well as the somewhat grotesque, almost Rabelaisian figures, of which The Polar Bear is just one example, it’s this verbal brilliance that I first enjoyed in the book. The audacious use of the author’s learning made me gasp inwardly (being young and English, I couldn’t possibly do so outwardly): Not only did he know his Dante, but he could have fun with it!

Having read (and enjoyed) Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners, when I came across More Pricks Than Kicks, I found it refreshing that one of Joyce’s old cronies would poke fun at him with some good-natured pastiche on his way to finding his own voice.

Take this passage from the story A Wet Night:

“But the wind had dropped, as it so often does in Dublin when all the respectable men and women whom it delights to annoy have gone to bed, and the rain fell in a uniform untroubled manner. It fell upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably upon the Central Bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity.”

Does that ring a bell? Of course it does. It takes us back to the justly celebrated beauty of the ending of The Dead from Dubliners (1914):

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

With Joyce, we have a moment of epiphany and great beauty. With Beckett, stealing a knowing glance at his former master, we have a matter-of-fact description that fits the tone of the the aptly-named story. The parody is gentle and Beckett’s writing is not without its own winning cadences, but no souls are swooning here.

Parody was perhaps a way for Beckett to escape the gravitational pull of Joyce and indeed the whole galaxy of Irish writers both past and present. This problem wasn’t (isn’t) unique to Beckett, of course. Anne Enright has written, “Irish writers are often asked do they think of Joyce, Wilde and Yeats when they walk the streets of Dublin. There can be only one answer – as the child gets the same answer when they ask the same question, over and again. Yes, of course we do. We think of little else.”

No wonder, then, that in Fingal, we see Belaqua (or rather, we are told about him) “going like flames” away from Stella’s Tower with his strong association with the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Belacqua’s immediate destination may only be “Taylor’s public-house,” as we’re told, but it feels like he (or Beckett) is trying to achieve escape velocity from the garrulous universe of the Irish canon.

There are also echoes forward in this desire for motion. And to those familiar with the peregrinations of Beckett’s later characters, from the tramps in Waiting For Godot to Molloy or Mercier and Camier, the following passage from the opening of Ding Dong, the next story in the collection, would come as no surprise:

“My sometime friend Belacqua enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place. He did not know how this conclusion had been gained but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another he felt sure. He was pleased to think that he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion.”

In this sense, you might consider this collection of stories as a gateway drug (but liberally adulterated with plenty of cheaper narcotics) to the eccentric pharmacopoeia of Beckett’s later fiction.

As I was in my late teens when I first read this book, I was naturally drawn to the undergraduate slapstick that features in many of these stories and which looks forward to the grotesque antics of some of the plays. An example is the Guard scene from A Wet Night:

“The next thing was his hands dragged roughly down from his eyes, which he opened on the vast crimson face of an ogre. For a moment it was still, plush gargoyle, then it moved, it was convulsed. This, he thought, is the face of some person talking. It was. It was that part of a Civic Guard pouring abuse upon him. Belacqua closed his eyes, there was no other way of ceasing to see it. Subduing a great desire to visit the pavement he catted, with undemonstrative abundance, all over the boots and trouser- ends of the Guard, in return for which incontinence he received such a dunch on the breast that he fell hip and thigh into the outskirts of his own offal.”

You have to love “outskirts of his own offal.”

After an elaborate description of Belacqua’s grovellings, comes a simple instruction from the Guard:

'Wipe them boots' said the Guard.

After this operation is finished, we see Belacqua at his most abject.

'I trust, Sergeant,' said Belacqua, in a murmur pitched to melt the hardest heart, 'that you can see your way to overlooking my misdemeanour.'

The visual humour and the physical comedy are not an accident—Beckett was a great fan of Buster Keaton films.

Let’s end with the scene that perhaps most attracted my youthful self to this collection of stories. In Dante and the Lobster, the collection’s first story and our introduction to the eccentric student Belacqua, we see him “stuck in the first of the canti in the moon.” He’s not only studying Dante but his name is that of a character from The Divine Comedy, one who was sentenced to Purgatory for his slothful nature.

This Belacqua, however, is anything but indolent when in the grip of an obsession. And his obsession here is assembling the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. All undergraduates have probably lived off cheese sandwiches at some stage, but Belacqua’s was different. It required burnt toast, putrid Gorgonzola and meticulous preparation.

We soon see our hero in the throes of his frenzied groundwork:

“Next a thick paste of Savora, salt and Cayenne on each round, worked well in while the pores were still open with the heat. No butter, God forbid, just a good forment of mustard and salt and pepper on each round. Butter was a blunder...”

Before long, he is dashing out to get the cheese:

“Now the great thing was to avoid being accosted. To be stopped at this stage and have conversational nuisance committed all over him would be a disaster. His whole being was straining forward towards the joy in store. If he were accosted now he might just as well fling his lunch into the gutter and walk straight back home. Sometimes his hunger, more of mind, I need scarcely say, than of body, for this meal amounted to such a frenzy that he would not have hesitated to strike any man rash enough to buttonhole and baulk him, he would have shouldered him out of his path without ceremony. Woe betide the meddler who crossed him when his mind was really set on this meal.”

I still enjoy reading this baroque description of Belacqua’s sandwich obsession, which will end in tears or, rather, harsh words, as the grocer’s cheese will turn out to be insufficiently rancid for the student’s purposes. The satire of culinary preciousness amuses, but I also smile at the knowing line, “his hunger, more of mind, I need scarcely say, than of body.” There’s a typical nod here to the Cartesian duality of mind vs. body that will echo in later works. “I need scarcely say” winkingly tells us we’re supposed to be in on the philosophical reference.

As I survey Beckett’s later work as an unabashed fan, I see Belacqua’s sandwich preparations, fraught, detailed and liable to go astray, as a portent of the writer’s furious and futile attempts (as he would see it) to get the right word.

Or perhaps, in his sly raspberry blown at Flaubert’s idea of the “mot juste,” the quest might be differently worded: “What is the wrong word?” asks the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981).

In any case, in his single-minded pursuit of the limits of language, Beckett reminds me of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who created so many similar works in the pursuit of a singular vision that he couldn’t quite attain. Giacometti once said, “The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.”

In More Pricks Than Kicks, a similar vision is hovering somewhere above that damply absurd and oddly peopled landscape, but the artist senses he’s not ready to express it yet. The right words, like the perfect cheese sandwich, would have to wait.

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