ABSTRACT
In the first years of his fame, Beckett proved rather reluctant to revisit his earliest work, despite the pressure brought to bear on him by publishers and academics. For example, he resisted offers to publish his first collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, until the late 1960s; the unfinished novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women did not appear until after his death; the early short stories 'Assumption', 'Sedendo et Quiescendo', 'Text' and A Case in a Thousand' remained uncollected until the publication of the collected shorter prose in 1995; another story ('Echoes Bones', a continuation of Belacqua Shuah's story after death and burial), is as yet unpublished. He resisted publication, not so much because he was afraid of the harm that the widespread availability of work he regarded as inferior might do to his reputation, but because he felt that his earlier work was simply not good enough. He didn't destroy old manuscripts, and he made the early unpublished work available to academics, but in general it took some time for Beckett to overcome his unwillingness to allow the earliest of his experiments in prose to stand alongside the mature work. [14-22]
Now that most of the texts are available, it is easy to see why. Even if one makes no judgement about the relative merit of the early writing, it is radically different in tone and approach than the work that Beckett produced in the aftermath of WW2. The author's own judgement, that the work was written by a young man 'with the itch to make and nothing to say' (Bair 1978: 84), might seem rather harsh, but it has been echoed in the analyses of such eminent Beckett scholars as John Pilling, who called the earliest of Beckett's writings
... a forced growth: extremely ambitious, courageously experimental, but a little too exotic ... to take root and be widely admired.
