Samuel Beckett's Library

"We have most of Beckett’s manuscript notebooks and also his reading notes, but the missing link was always Beckett’s own library. Shortly before Beckett’s death, he asked his authorised biographer James Knowlson to take some of his books for the archive here at the University of Reading. So, about twenty or thirty volumes were accessible to scholars. But the main library was still in the flat where he lived, at the Boulevard Saint-Jacques in Paris. In about 2005, Dirk and I approached his literary executor Edward Beckett, Beckett’s nephew, if he would allow us access to the library to study his reading traces. He kindly agreed to that and gave us exclusive access to the library. We spent about ten days there, just scanning every single page for annotations. It was a rather time-consuming process, as you can imagine. We were going through Beckett’s Encyclopaedia Britannica in a rather tired manner, always thinking that if you miss the next page out then it might just have that one clue to Waiting for Godot or something like that. But it was a fascinating time that we spent there. The library itself is fascinating because it gives us an insight into his reading habits on the one hand but also just the cultural context within which he is moving. A wide-ranging and intense reader, on the one hand, and one who also, to a certain extent, cheated. You have a very intense study of certain authors—certain philosophers, even—but at the same time, you have a wonderful pattern whereby some of the books that survive—and in particular, some of the philosophical books—contain traces of his reading, e.g. which pages have annotations—though of course, that’s not an exact science. You see that sometimes he reads the introduction to a philosophical work rather than the actual philosophical work itself. He has the complete works of Immanuel Kant —thirteen volumes—but the only volume that shows serious engagement, at least in terms of reading signs like marginalia and annotations, is the thirteenth, which is the introductory volume by Ernst Cassirer, rather than Kant’s work itself. Another example is his copy of Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus where he has clearly annotated the introduction by Bertrand Russell, but the actual text by Wittgenstein shows no marginalia at all. So, he’s not one kind or another kind of reader. “He was a wide-ranging and intense reader, on the one hand, and somebody who also, to a certain extent, cheated.” As a young man, he read incredibly widely. Not just in terms of literature—though he read literature of all periods, in many different languages—but he reads an enormous amount about psychology and visual arts. He reads many texts about science, on geology. His early reading habits are clearly influenced by Joyce: there are no barriers. And like Joyce, he obscures the source to a certain degree. For us manuscript scholars, this makes it very difficult, because he will copy out a sentence into one of his notebooks but refrain from saying where it comes from. That was a typical Joyce procedure; Joyce wasn’t really concerned with the context of where he was getting his material from. He was just interested in the phrase or in the actual word, the way it sounded, and so on. Beckett was very much influenced by that. His later reading habits are different. There, he’s more or less reminding himself where he’s getting his notes from. Yes, there’s a wide variety there. Beckett famously gave away a lot of books, so it’s quite surprising how many of his student books survive. The library contains just shy of 800 books, but we know that he read far more than that. There is a lot of amusing marginalia in his student books. He very often disagrees with some of the writers. He writes ‘balls!’ on the side of one of the texts he’s reading: Proust’s Recherche . He also criticises Hölderlin for using certain words too often. So, he’s criticising what he’s reading. “Every now and again you’ll get an insight into just how alert a reader he is” The student books are also sometimes not that interesting. He’s studying modern languages, reading in Italian and French. Sometimes he’s just translating a word that he’s not understood. But every now and again you’ll get an insight into just how alert a reader he is. For example, in his Italian Bible— La Sacra Bibbia —he annotates a lot of the rather sexual passages of the Bible and cross-references them to d’Alembert. You can see that while he’s reading he’s thinking of something else, and this allows us to retrace how he himself combined texts. In this case, he was moving very, very easily between an Italian language Bible and an eighteenth-century French text."