When I’ve posted this I’ll go & have a Turkish bath & stupefy my nerves in sweaty duration. My person is developing dirty habits.
The editors’ footnote to this letter of 1931 is hygienically exact: “At this time, Trinity College Dublin did not have bathing facilities; the Turkish bath on Lincoln Place and another on Leinster Street were the two nearest to TCD.” That is good to know, but, still, where does “my person” end and the business of writing begin? Should we adhere to a Cartesian division of the two, or is it not more honest to admit that the making of literature, at the nib’s end, is not so much a noble calling as one of the “dirty habits” to which an author is compelled, no more or less mysterious than the call of the bathroom or the temptations of the fridge? When the letter was written, Beckett was twenty-four, in the first stirrings of his creative prose, and about to plunge into “Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” the headlong novel that he completed the following year. Its hero, Belacqua, who reappeared in “More Pricks Than Kicks,” Beckett’s 1934 collection of linked tales, is a fetid fellow: “He sat not looking, his head sunk, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers.” He is, in short, a precursor of those who populate the books of Beckett’s maturity: the encased, the unwashed, the mendicant, and all those curled up as if against the onset of a kicking. So, yes, maybe that “sweaty duration” of 1931 is of scholarly interest after all.
—Anthony Lane on Beckett’s letters in The New Yorker.
(I’m quite fond of the confluence of person, myth and work.)
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