A previously unpublished story by Samuel Beckett, the famed Irish author of Waiting for Godot , will now be published for the first time, 80 years after his publisher rejected it as a nightmare read.
The story, titled Echo’s Bones , was originally commissioned as a final story for More Pricks Than Kicks , Beckett’s collection of inter-related stories published in 1934.
However, his publisher at the time, Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus, rejected the story for being far too difficult and strange.
“It is a nightmare...It gives me the jim-jams... Echo’s Bones would, I am sure, lose the book a great many readers. People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analysing the shudder. I hate having to say this,” he wrote in a letter to Beckett.
The 13,500-word story was held back from inclusion in the published volume and has since remained hidden in American archives.
It will now be published by Faber & Faber in a new volume edited by Dr. Mark Nixon, reader in modern literature at the University of Reading, The Observer reported.
“The literary merit of Echo’s Bones is evident; moreover, it is a vital document,” Dr. Nixon writes in the introduction of the new volume.
The rejected story features the protagonist of the ninth story, Yellow , published in More Pricks Than Kicks
In Yellow , the central character, Belacqua, dies after surgery in hospital. In Echo’s Bones , Belacqua is faced with an afterlife.
In December 1933, Beckett wrote to a friend that the rejection of a story “into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of, discouraged me profoundly”.
Dr. Nixon believes that the failure of the story prompted Beckett, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1969, to write a poem of the same name, and to use the title again for his first collection of poems, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates , published in 1935.
