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NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF
BECKETT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Samuel Beckett’s Legacies

in American Fiction
Problems in Postmodernism
James Baxter
New Interpretations of Beckett
in the Twenty-First Century
Series Editor
Jennifer M. Jeffers
Department of English
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, OH, USA
As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe,
Samuel Beckett's texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to
be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations
of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new approaches and
develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series
will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations con-
cerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent
writers, artists, and thinkers.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14737
James Baxter
Samuel Beckett’s
Legacies in American
Fiction
Problems in Postmodernism
James Baxter
London, UK
New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

ISBN 978-3-030-81571-4 ISBN 978-3-030-81572-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81572-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgements
This book would not exist without the encouragement and support of
colleagues at the University of Reading where much of the research for
Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction took place. Thanks go to
everybody at the Beckett Research Centre and the Beckett at Reading
Postgraduate group for the interest and warmth with which discussion of
this project was received. In particular, I wish to thank Professor Steven
Matthews for his patience as PhD supervisor and continued support in the
process of turning this ‘white whale’ of a thesis into a book. Thank you to
Peter Boxall for generous thoughts on the project, and everyone who
offered insight, both large and small, including Mark Nixon, Stephen
Thomson, David Brauner, Peter Stoneley, Nicola Wilson, Conor Carville,
John Pilling and Katherine Weiss. During the unparalleled strangeness of
the past year, the support of friends and family has been vital in seeing this
project through. Thanks to George for reading sections of this book and
the valuable comments. Thank you to my mum and dad for the encour-
agement both now and during the project’s past life as a PhD thesis.
Finally, I wish to thank Jo, without whom this book would not have been
written.
v
Contents
1 Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right country…’ 1
2 Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett and the American

‘Underground’ 27
3 Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme

and Metafictional Style After Beckett103
4 ‘…between zero and one’: Opposing Tendencies

in the Exhaustive Fiction of Samuel Beckett and
Thomas Pynchon133
5 Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’171
6 Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Beckett’s Post-Millennial

Legacies209
7 A ‘Postmodern Icon’?243
Index257
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Back cover of Evergreen Review, No. 5 (Summer 1958).

(Reprinted by permission of the Evergreen Review (www.
evergreenreview.com))44
Fig. 2.2 Philippe Halsman’s front cover design for Evergreen Review,
No. 34 (December 1964). (Reprinted by permission of the
Evergreen Review, (www.evergreenreview.com)) 71
Fig. 2.3 ‘For Adults Only,’ advertising for Evergreen subscription,
reprinted by permission of Evergreen Review (www.
evergreenreview.com)76
Fig. 2.4 Advert for the first collected edition of Beckett’s writing, The
Collected Works of Samuel Beckett (Grove: New York, 1970).
(Reprinted by permission of the Evergreen Review, (www.
evergreenreview.com))88
Fig. 2.5 The final issue of Evergreen’s initial print run, No. 96, (Spring
1973). (Reprinted by permission of the Evergreen Review
(www.evergreenreview.com))91
ix
CHAPTER 1
Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right

country…’
Samuel Beckett would only travel to the United States once. His month-
long trip to New York in 1964 coincided with the production of Film
(1965), a 22-minute black and white short starring Buster Keaton in one
of his final roles on screen. From the beginning, the production was beset
by a series of problems. While Keaton would go on to give an effective
performance in the role of O, he would not be the first choice of Beckett
or director Alan Schneider for the lead role, initially considering Charlie
Chaplin, Zero Mostel and Beckett stalwart Jack MacGowran (the latter
unable to perform due to a scheduling conflict with another film engage-
ment). By all accounts, Keaton was puzzled by Beckett’s Film, requiring
him to flee the camera and leaving the silent movie icon’s signature ‘stone
face’ hidden until the last shot. During the shoot, complications over how
to visualize Beckett’s characteristically demanding script would be com-
pounded by Schneider’s inexperience as a film director, with little time to
prepare for a medium in which he was a neophyte. Difficulties in produc-
tion would be mirrored in the struggle to find an audience; while Film
fared relatively well at European film festivals (winning a handful of prizes,
including the Critic’s Choice Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1965),
it would largely mystify American critics, with its first public screening at
the New York Film Festival receiving boos, and resulting in Schneider’s
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Baxter, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction, New
Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81572-1_1
2 J. BAXTER
hasty departure from the theatre.1 Echoing Beckett’s belief in the project
as an ‘interesting failure,’ S.E. Gontarski ultimately writes of the unsatis-
factory nature of the American film in which what we are left with ‘is a
string of unsolved problems.’2
On August 6, several days after the end of production, Beckett left
New York marking the end of his American visit. Upon departing, he
would express to his American publisher, Barney Rosset: ‘this is somehow
not the right country for me.’3 Beckett’s perplexing remark provides an
overture of sorts to this study, which seeks to trace the author’s profound,
albeit sometimes awkward, presence in American culture. This will be con-
ducted through reference to Beckett’s complicated legacies in American
fiction, with a focus on the development of postmodern literature: from
Robert Coover to Lydia Davis. One of the few critics to respond positively
to Beckett’s Film would be Franco-American novelist and Beckett scholar
Raymond Federman, praising Schneider’s direction and reaffirming
Beckett’s capacity to turn aesthetic failure into ‘a howling success.’4
(Together with John Fletcher, Federman would be responsible for the first
bibliography of Beckett’s work and criticism in 1970.)5 By the 1969 Nobel
‘Catastrophe,’ the taciturn Beckett had been unexpectedly launched into
the spotlight, a literary iconoclast feted by the American avant-garde while
also attracting glossy write-ups in commercial magazines such as Time and
Vogue. As we will see, this chapter’s tentative sketch of Beckett’s disorderly
passage into America prefigures some of the crucial factors that inform the
investigations of this book.
In one of the few publications to address Beckett’s reception in America,
Natka Bianchini illustrates how the initially sour response to Film would
recall much of the early critical suspicion to Beckett performances—exem-
plified by the ill-fated 1956 premiere of Waiting for Godot in Miami.
Providing a substantial analysis of Beckett’s engagements in the American
1
See Alan Schneider, ‘On Directing Film,’ in Film, (Grove Press: New York, 1969),
pp. 63–94.
2
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Film and Formal Integrity,’ in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives,
(Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1983), p. 136.
3
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, (Bloomsbury: London,
1996), p. 525.
4
Raymond Federman, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Film on the Agony of Perceivedness,’ in James
Joyce Quarterly, (Summer 1971), p. 371.
5
Samuel Beckett: His Work and his Critics, ed. by Raymond Federman, John Fletcher,
(University of California Press, 1968).
1 BECKETT IN AMERICA: ‘SOMEHOW NOT THE RIGHT COUNTRY…’ 3
theatre, Bianchini valuably comments on the often-irreconcilable tensions

between Beckett’s denatured worlds and the tradition of American real-
ism, demonstrating the conflict between Beckett’s spectral figures and the
kind of revelatory identifications required of the Stanislavski-based
‘Method’ popularized by the Actor’s Studio. In response to Alan
Schneider’s 1972 letter, soliciting a backstory for the disembodied mouth
of Not I (1972), Beckett would offer the peremptory response: ‘I no more
know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text.
“She” is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage
text. The rest is Ibsen.’6 Reinforcing Beckett’s geographical (and tempera-
mental) distance, Bianchini, nonetheless, demonstrates how the author
would rely on a small number of dependable mediators to conduct his
affairs in absentia, focusing on the ‘implicit trust’7 between Beckett and
Alan Schneider. In turn, the American director would take on the difficult
task of introducing Beckett’s theatre to American audiences, from the first
clumsy Beckett productions of the 1950s, through to largely well-received
performances such as the 1961 world premiere of Happy Days in New York,
and memorable productions of late works like Ohio Impromptu (1981).
Their close professional relationship, and personal friendship, would be
honoured in Schneider’s posthumous memoir Entrances: An American
Director’s Journey (1986), with the Beckett-Schneider correspondence
released in 2000’s No Author Better Served.
Alongside Schneider, Barney Rosset’s Grove Press would be instru-
mental in representing Beckett’s American interests and making his texts
widely available for readers (a vital role, as Bianchini avers, that ‘cannot be
overstated’8). Commissioned as the debut feature of Grove subsidiary,
Evergreen Theatre, Film was intended as the first of a series of works to
include contributions by Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco, with the
film’s lack of success influencing the publisher’s decision to discontinue
the project. Despite this setback, Beckett would remain a vital component
of Grove’s publishing concerns, with Rosset cultivating an equally warm
trans-Atlantic correspondence with the author throughout his career.
Alongside Beckett, Grove represented a diverse catalogue of authors
6
Schneider to Beckett, October 16, 1972, in No Author Better Served: The Correspondence
of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. by Maurice Harmon, (Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, 1998), p. 283.
7
Natka Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, (Palgrave Macmillan: New York,
2015), p. 3.
8
Ibid. p. 12.
4 J. BAXTER
whose work would shape the various faces of post-war literary avant-
gardism: including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alexander Trocchi, Allen
Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Robert Coover, Pauline Réage, Kenzaburō
Ō e, J.G. Ballard and Kathy Acker. Revealing the publisher’s talents for
bringing publicity to the literary vanguard, Gontarski writes that Rosset
would ‘market the avant-garde writer [Beckett] aggressively, almost obses-
sively, in the United States,’9 releasing significant volumes such as Krapp’s
Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (1960), How it is (1964), as well as
the 1965 reissue of Beckett’s Trilogy under Grove’s mass market Black Cat
imprint. By the early 1970s, Joseph Epstein would write in The New York
Times that ‘if books about him continue, he will rank with Christ, Napoleon
and Wagner.’10
If America is ‘somehow not the right country,’ Beckett’s works also
betray a persistent tendency to extend ‘somehow on’ (my italics, Worstward
Ho [1983], 81). By highlighting the vicissitudes of Beckett’s reception in
the United States, this study will aspire to tell a different story about the
people responsible for bringing bits of Beckett across to America. As Peter
Boxall writes (a critic who has done more than most to situate Beckett’s
writing in relation to global American culture), the enduring connections
between ‘Beckett and the end, Beckett and lastness, have begun in recent
years to give way to a new dawning sense that Beckett is also the source of
new beginnings, of new possibilities.’11 This in turn is reflected in Beckett’s
vigorous accommodation in the American arts in recent decades, enjoying
a remarkably broad appeal that reaches across mediums, impacting figures
as diverse as David Mamet, Suzan Lori-Parks, Edward Gorey, Amiri
Baraka, David Lynch, Bruce Nauman, Philip Glass, Michael Gira and
Elliot Smith. In Jonathan Kalb’s 2007 series of interviews with American
playwrights, Beckett emerges as a writer whose works have inexorably
altered the fabric of American theatre; as Will Eno archly states, ‘as long as
people still die, I think he’ll be important.’12
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America,’ in A

9
Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by S.E. Gontarski, (Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester,

2010), p. 26.
10
Joseph Epstein, ‘If Books About Him Continue, He Will Rank With Christ, Napoleon
and Wagner,’ New York Times, (November 25, 1973) http://www.nytimes.
com/1973/11/25/archives/if-books-about-him-continue-he-will-rank-with-christ-
napoleon-and.html?mcubz=1
11
Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, (Continuum:
New York, 2009), p. 22.
12
Quoted in Jonathan Kalb, ‘American Playwrights on Beckett,’ in PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, (January, 2007), p. 4.
Such an auspicious account would not be borne out in the immediate

reception of Beckett’s writing in the 1950s, with audiences maintaining
suspicion of work that seemed obscure and, at times, hostile. For Bianchini,
the infamous premiere of Waiting for Godot in Miami (January 3, 1956)
would exemplify the ‘mistakes, miscommunications and misunderstand-
ings’13 characteristic of Beckett’s early American ventures. Staged at the
newly opened Coconut Grove playhouse, producer Michael Myerberg’s
questionable decision to promise audiences ‘the laugh hit of two conti-
nents’14 would be exacerbated by the effort to turn the play into a star-
studded event. Featuring Hollywood actors Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell in
the roles of Estragon and Vladimir, the play closed after two weeks fol-
lowing poor audience response and an atmosphere of increasing distrust
between Schneider and Myerberg. To New York Times drama critic Mel
Gussow, Lahr quips that ‘playing Waiting for Godot in Miami was like
doing Giselle at Roseland.’15 More striking, however, is a sense of essential
incompatibility between the pessimistic world-view of Beckett and
American audiences; this is evident in an angry fan letter to Lahr, asking
‘how can a man, who has charmed the youth of America as the lion in The
Wizard of Oz, appear in a play that is communistic, atheistic and
existential?’16 In conflict with the American mythos of youth, piety and
cultural optimism, the premiere of Godot, Gontarski writes, rendered ‘the
future of Beckett in the United States […] something less than
promising.’17
Despite the Miami debacle, Lahr would go on to reprise the role of
Estragon in the play’s Broadway opening later that year.18 Replacing
Schneider with Herbert Berghof as director, Myerberg would adjust the
marketing to emphasize the play’s philosophical currents—issuing a call
13
Natka Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, p. 19.
14
Quoted in S.E. Gontarski, ‘Beckett’s Reception in the USA,’ in The International
Reception of Samuel Beckett, ed. by Mark Nixon, Matthew Feldman, (Continuum: London,
2009), p. 12.
15
Deidre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p. 459.
16
Ibid.
17
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Beckett’s Reception in the USA,’ p. 12.
18
See John Lahr, ‘The Rise and Fall of Beckett’s Bum: Bert Lahr in Godot,’ in Evergreen
Review, No. 70, (September, 1969), pp. 29–32, 79–86; also Alan Schneider’s full account of
the Miami production in ‘Waiting for Beckett,’ in New York Times, (17 November, 1985),
later published as a chapter from Schneider’s posthumous memoir Entrances, (Viking:
New York, 1986), p. 221–239.
6 J. BAXTER
for ‘seventy thousand intellectuals.’19 Critical feedback remained largely

divided, exemplified by the cultivated bafflement of Brooks Atkinson’s
‘unreviews’ in The New York Times. Atkinson warns the reader, ‘don’t
expect this column to explain’ Beckett’s play: ‘It is a mystery wrapped in
an enigma.’20 A similar caution is offered in response to the premiere of
Endgame (January 28, 1958): ‘Don’t expect this column to give a coher-
ent account of what—if anything—happens.’21 Of Godot’s early American
critics, Eric Bentley’s review in the New Republic stands out for its depth
of insight. Responding to critics of the Broadway production, Bentley
frames Godot as a ‘problem for our audiences,’22 (my italics) identifying ‘a
nausea’ which ‘American optimism drives […] a little more deeply
underground.’23 In Bentley’s formulation, the friction between Beckett
and the American public is not considered one of essential differences.
Instead, the play signifies the dormant potential of an amorphous ‘under-
ground’ tendency, a ‘problem’ whose cultural impact is expressed indi-
rectly and by alternate means.
The association of Beckett with the nascent, proto-countercultural
‘underground’ would be highly significant in redirecting the author’s
meandering passage into the United States at the dawn of the 1960s.
Reinforcing the rebellious veneer around Beckett’s writing, poet and
essayist Kenneth Rexroth—a galvanizing figure in the San Francisco
Renaissance—upholds the 1955 Grove publication of Molloy as ‘the final
word to date in the long indictment of industrial and commercial
civilization.’24 Elsewhere, Beckett emerges as an uneasy icon for Beat fig-
ures such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Terry Southern, as
well as activist leaders Carl Oglesby and Todd Gitlin. As this book will
demonstrate, Beckett’s reputation as the ‘moody man of letters’ (thus
named in Israel Shenker’s 1956 interview in The New York Times25) would
Quoted in Natka Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, p. 35.

19
Brooks Atkinson, ‘Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,”’ in New York Times, (April 20, 1956),
20
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-godot.html?mcubz=0
21
Brooks Atkinson, ‘Beckett’s “Endgame,”’ in New York Times, (January 29, 1958),
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-endgame.html?mcubz=0
22
Eric Bentley, ‘The Talent of Samuel Beckett,’ in Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot: a
Casebook, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Macmillan: London, 1987), p. 60.
23
Ibid.
24
Kenneth Rexroth, ‘The Point is Irrelevance,’ in Dear Mr. Beckett: Letters from the
Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File, (Opus: New York, 2017), p. 115.
25
See Israel Shenker, ‘An Interview with Beckett (1956),’ in Samuel Beckett: The Critical
Heritage, ed. by Raymond Federman and Lawrence Graver, (Routledge: London 1979).
draw from both mainstream and alternative modes of legitimation: some-

times obfuscating clear distinctions between the two. Stephen John Dilks
highlights Beckett’s integration in the literary marketplace as a form of
anti-commodity, revealing the machinations of image management
through the author’s self-conscious attitude towards self-branding (Dilks
references the efforts of Grove Press as a primary agent in this regard).26
Reflecting Beckett’s incorporation from the outside to the heart of
American culture, Bianchini’s trajectory of Beckett ‘reconstructions’ is
one driven by ‘a widening circle of acceptance and praise.’27 Leading the
reader from the early misfortunes of Miami, through a ‘series of firsts’ in
the 1960s (including the production of Film), we arrive at Beckett’s
‘American zenith’ in the 1980s, and his consolidation as an author of both
American and international import. And yet, this study will be equally
concerned with legacies that are defined by deracination and distance. For
writers as stylistically divergent as Donald Barthelme and Paul Auster,
Beckett’s seminal Trilogy is framed as an overwhelming, occasionally sti-
fling impetus over their own literary projects, at once enabling the act of
writing while hindering the power to go on ‘from nought anew’ (Company
[1979], 14).
By exploring Beckett’s American reception through the individual bod-
ies of work that he influences, this book will open a new avenue for con-
sidering Beckett’s legacies outside of his established European contexts.
Notable volumes such as The International Reception of Samuel Beckett
(2009) and the more recent Samuel Beckett as World Literature (2020)
offer fresh views beyond Beckett’s cosmopolitan Europeanism, valuably
situating his global standing across interdisciplinary fields of performance,
publishing and translation studies. Alongside this, the possibility of
unearthing the latent Irishness of Beckett’s migratory narratives emerges
as a significant critical tendency following Eoin O’Brien’s major work of
literary historicism, The Beckett Country (1986).28 In an exemplary study,
Seán Kennedy frames Beckett’s narratives of exile as a confrontation with
26
Stephen John Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace, (Syracuse University
Press: New York, 2011), p. 17.
27
Natka Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, p. 13.
28
For a representative sample, see John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett, (Syracuse
University Press: New York, 1991); Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness,
(Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2009); Beckett and Ireland, ed. by Seán Kennedy, (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2010); and Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation
from Beckett to the Present, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2017).
8 J. BAXTER
revenant Irishness, through which Beckett’s connection to nationhood is

restated as a moment of ‘haunting, or failing to forget, issuing in a con-
tinuing confrontation with loss.’29 By contrast with Kennedy’s fundamen-
tally melancholy account of Beckett’s Irish modernism, this study reaches
towards Beckett’s altogether more vertiginous flight into American post-
modernism. While Beckett’s place in post-war American culture is often
tacitly acknowledged (the scholarships of Bianchini and Gontarski serve as
notable correctives in this regard), there has been little sustained attention
to his influence over the highly dynamic period of American writing cov-
ered in this study. Moving beyond familiar modernist interlocutors such as
James Joyce, W.B. Yeats or Franz Kafka, the following chapters hope to
open the field to alternative, and at times surprising, legacies—true to the
author who would admire both the disaffected adolescence of J.D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Kurt Vonnegut’s zany anti-war jeremiad
Slaughterhouse-5 (1969).
Before we explore these legacies, it is worth briefly turning to the one
act play Ohio Impromptu (1981); produced at the height of Beckett’s
‘American Zenith,’ the late drama’s ‘ironic’ title (neither explicitly con-
cerning the American state of Ohio nor an impromptu in the strictest
sense) betrays the sometimes-clumsy reconfiguration of Beckett into the
American sphere. The play would be written to meet S.E. Gontarski’s
request for a new piece of writing and was directed by Alan Schneider as
part of the Ohio State University’s Beckett Seminar in celebration of the
author’s 75th birthday. Despite the seemingly throwaway nature of the
text’s appellation, it constitutes the only elected place named in the title of
a published Beckett work and would subsequently be included in the final
print issue of the influential Grove magazine Evergreen Review, alongside
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Kathy Acker. Casting largely
identical figures, Beckett’s doppelgangers, ‘Reader’ and ‘Listener,’ enact a
brief drama of separation and union, with the former intoning the muted
narrative of an unnamed figure’s displacement following the loss of a loved
one—‘relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar
room. Unfamiliar scene’ (445). Situated amid the abstract stage-space of
so much late Beckett theatre, the narrative nevertheless evokes a Parisian
habitation on the Isle of Swans, conducting an imaginary narrative flight
29
Seán Kennedy, ‘Does Beckett Studies require a Subject? Memory and Mourning in the
Texts for Nothing,’ in Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, ed. by Katherine Weiss,
Sean Kennedy, (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009), p. 15.
that also restricts full identification with the play’s American destination.
Later on, the ‘Reader’ envisages a ‘receding stream’ which the protagonist
of the story experiences at the tip of the islet: a fading channel at the heart
of the play’s ‘unfamiliar’ environs, flowing back to the author’s adopted
Parisian domain. Implicating Beckett’s professional network of artistic and
scholarly advocates in the United States, Ohio Impromptu also gives rise to
a remote image of Beckett’s faraway affection, ‘somehow’ out of step with
his American context.
‘Unlikely, if not odd’: Beckett, Rosset

and American Postmodernism
By contending with Beckett’s legacies in America, this book will also posi-
tively intervene in Beckett’s long-standing association with postmodern-
ism with a close eye to the literary works underpinning what can sometimes
seem like a baggy and cumbersome category. As a result, Samuel Beckett’s
Legacies necessarily resides alongside a long line of works that have inter-
rogated Beckett’s relation to the diverse intellectual cultures nourished by
postmodernism. Scholarly studies by Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd,
Thomas Tresize, Lois Oppenheim, Steven Connor, Susan D. Brienza and
many others have articulated Beckett’s natural affinity with poststructural-
ist philosophy, with Uhlmann’s exemplary investigation demonstrating
the productive resonances between the agitated textuality of Beckett’s
novels and twentieth-century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze and Michel Foucault.30 Richard Begam has also convincingly
positioned Beckett’s writing as a ‘buried subtext or marginalium in French
poststructuralism,’31 highlighting Beckett’s extended enactment of the
end of modernity. Further commentary on Beckett’s frequently tense rela-
tionship to modernist and postmodernist periodization will be provided in
the final methodological section of this introduction. Nevertheless, if the
following chapters tread rather more lightly on Beckett’s theoretical
legacies, it will be emphatically argued that his proximity to the postmod-
ern requires closer attention to the post-war realignment of postmod-
ern American fiction (occluded in many scholarly accounts).
30
Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, (University of Western Sydney:
Hawkesbury, 1999).
31
Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, (Stanford University Press:
Stanford, 1996), p. 4.
10 J. BAXTER
At the outset, it is vital to emphasize Beckett’s practical connections

with his American publisher, Grove Press, and the in-house magazine
Evergreen Review, as significant catalysts for the author’s legacies in
America and postmodernism more broadly. Beginning with the exchange
of letters in June 1953, the close relationship between Beckett and Barney
Rosset would significantly impact the course of Beckett’s career in the
second half of the 20th century, serving as his publisher and later theatrical
agent in America. However, as Gontarski writes ‘the Rosset-Beckett match
seemed, at the outset, unlikely, if not odd’—‘a shy, bookish, taciturn artist
with impeccable (if not nineteenth-century) manners, on the one hand,
and a brash, volatile, street-smart American more comfortable in the jazz
clubs of Chicago than any library or university.’32 The only child of Jewish
and Irish Catholic parents, Rosset attended the progressive Francis Parker
School where he developed the staunch left wing political convictions that
would inform much of his publishing career. Leading a peripatetic early
life as a drop-out from the University of Chicago and Swarthmore College,
Rosset’s discovery of the obscene novels of Henry Miller shaped his com-
mitment to formally inventive and often sexually provocative writing.
After a period living as a bohemian expatriate in Paris alongside abstract
expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, Rosset returned to New York where
he would purchase a small reprint house, Grove Press, for $3000.33
Over the subsequent decades, Rosset, together with figures such as
Donald Allen, Richard Seaver, Judith Schmidt and Fred Jordan, success-
fully built Grove Press into one of the major American publishing ventures
of the 1960s. During this time, the publisher acted as an essential node in
connecting Beckett with the American market, engineering his trip to
New York in 1964 and serving as a trusted ally overseas. To acquaintances,
Beckett would speak warmly of ‘my American rogue,’34 and in early
exchanges Rosset was assiduous in his desire to launch the author into ‘the
American mish mash.’35 Despite concerns as to the translatability of his
writing (Beckett comments that Molloy is bound to be ‘unamerican in
rhythm and atmosphere’), the English translations of the Trilogy and
32
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America,’ p. 24.
33
At the time of Rosset’s purchase, the only titles on the Grove Press backlist were The
Confidence Man by Herbert Melville, Selected Writings of the Ingenious Aphra Behn, and
English Verse by Richard Crashaw.
34
Quoted in Dear Mr. Beckett: Letters from the Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File, p. 28.
35
Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, October 25, 1955, Dear Mr. Beckett: The Samuel
Beckett File, p. 91.
Waiting for Godot would go on to become highly influential Grove publi-

cations for a new generation of American authors and activists. Sold for
$1, the paperback edition of Waiting for Godot would represent a mile-
stone in Beckett’s career, celebrated by Rosset as ‘the crown jewel of our
publishing house.’36 Loren Glass (whose scholarship, along with that of
Gontarski, offers a cohesive and critical history of Grove Press) restates the
importance of this ‘iconic American paperback,’ (my italics) having sold
‘more than two million copies’37 by 2006. In a prescient letter concerning
the promise of Beckett’s recognition in America, Rosset writes of ‘an
underground of interest here, the kind of interest that slowly generates
steam and has a lasting stock.’38
Inadvertently echoing Eric Bentley’s invocation of a nascent ‘under-
ground,’ Grove would enmesh the author within the growing social and
political ferment of the early 1960s counterculture. Intimations of this
cultural shift would be prefigured in two significant productions of Godot
in 1957. Seven months after the close of the original Broadway produc-
tion, the play was performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York
(January 21, 1957) with an all-Black cast to the considerable enthusiasm
of Beckett (the production would close after six performances due to a
union dispute). This was followed by the now-legendary San Quentin
State Prison production (November 19, 1957), further associating
Beckett’s play with the American underclass and giving birth to the San
Quentin Drama Workshop. Director Herbert Blau writes of Godot as an
anticipation of the ‘quiet valor and waiting dissent’ of sit-in activism,
declaring the play to be ‘the most important political drama of the fifties.’39
Meanwhile, Grove continued to siphon Beckett away from the cultural
mainstream and towards the eccentric margins represented by off-
Broadway theatre (to Beckett, Rosset sends up his reputation as ‘the vil-
lage crank’40). Beckett’s name would turn up frequently in the pages of the
alternative newspaper The Village Voice, with co-founder Norman Mailer
36
Ibid. p. 345.
37
Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and the
Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2013), p. 65.
38
Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, October 20, 1955, Dear Mr. Beckett: The Samuel
Beckett File, p. 89.
39
Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern, (Indiana University Press:
Bloomington, 1987), pp. 5–6.
40
Quoted in S.E. Gontarski, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in
America,’ p. 27.
12 J. BAXTER
and drama critic Jerry Tallmer writing positively of Godot,41 and the pub-
lication of correspondence between Beckett and Alan Schneider reframing
the author’s intransigence—from the ‘Miami fiasco,’42 to the author’s
refusal to offer ‘exegesis of any kind’—as curios of bohemian lore.
The same period would also see the debut publication of the Grove in-
house periodical Evergreen Review which, over two decades, served as a
kinetic outpost for Beckett and the wider ecosystem of Rosset’s prized
authors. As we will see, the emergence of Evergreen would mark a pivotal
moment of Beckett’s passage into the American ‘mish mash’ with the
magazine developing into an increasingly unruly postmodern document
in its own right. Over its initial 16 years in print, Beckett would appear
regularly, with No. 1 featuring Beckett’s early short story ‘Dante and the
Lobster’ and poetry from the Echo’s Bones collection. The review would go
on to publish texts from across Beckett’s career, including historically sig-
nificant items such as the international debut publication of Krapp’s Last
Tape. While early issues betray a high seriousness not unlike late modernist
quarterlies such as Partisan Review, the increasingly carnivalesque texture
of the Grove magazine broadly reflected Rosset’s literary and political
obsessions, emboldened by the publisher’s high-profile support of for-
merly ‘obscene’ texts such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961) and William Burroughs’
Naked Lunch (1962). To legendary Italian publisher Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli, Rosset articulates his absolutist defence of the ‘freedom to
read,’ stating that ‘I feel that personally there hasn’t been a word written
or uttered that shouldn’t be published, singly or in multiples.’43 The peri-
odical’s confrontation with American censors aligned with Beckett’s own
experience of British and Irish censorship, with Gontarski pointing to the
galvanizing effect of Beckett’s Molloy over Rosset’s initial battles against
41
After dismissing Waiting for Godot as ‘a poem to impotence,’ Mailer would notably
retract this criticism: ‘…because “Waiting for Godot” is a play about impotence rather than
an ode to it, and while its view of life is indeed hopeless, it is an art work, and therefore, I
believe, a good.’ Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, (Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, 1992), p. 320.
42
‘Beckett’s Letters on Endgame: Extracts from his Correspondence with Alan Schneider,’
in Village Voice, (March 19, 1958). Later republished in Village Voice Reader, ed. by Daniel
Wolf, Edwin Fancher, (Doubleday: New York, 1962). Reference taken from ‘On Endgame,’
in Disjecta, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Calder: London, 1983), p. 109.
43
Quoted in S.E. Gontarski, Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn,
(Bloomsbury: London, 2018), pp. 69–70.
the strictures of the American postal censor.44 Blurring pop and protest,
the magazine transitioned from its unassuming paperback format into a
full-colour, mass-market magazine by 1964, providing an open invitation
for readers to ‘Join the Underground.’
In its glossy commercial format, Loren Glass writes that Evergreen
would become ‘the premiere underground magazine of the Sixties
counterculture.’45 Situated at the centre of a series of embryonic avant-
gardes, the magazine provides an unparalleled dramatisation of Beckett’s
passage into the American ferment. Bundled alongside Dionysian icons of
the Beat movement, as well as reporting from the front-line of the student-
led counterculture, Evergreen also finds Beckett reframed alongside an
increasingly playful and profane literary sensibility. The publication of writ-
ing by William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond
Queneau, Terry Southern and Kathy Acker concretize the fragmented and
confrontational style that would be highly influential in the advent of liter-
ary postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s. Gontarski writes, ‘in its quarto
size, Evergreen Review may have represented the tail end of the modernist
little magazine tradition. The glossy, visually oriented, sexually explicit
Evergreen Review on the other hand celebrated postmodernism.’46 Perhaps
Grove’s most singular contribution to American postmodernism would be
the publication of Robert Coover whose highly playful, occasionally por-
nographic, short fiction would stage a colourful debt to Beckett’s mid-
century novels. As a frequent contributor to Evergreen, Coover remarks
upon the rise of Grove Press as a catalytic influence over a new period of
experimentation in American writing, pointing to the overlapping influ-
ences of Borges, Nabokov and Beckett as ‘underground icons’ and ‘a kind
of recognition code’47 for readers and writers. As we will see, Coover would
foreground Beckett’s ruthless admonition of ‘the silly Billy Graham
44
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Art and Commodity: Beckett’s Commerce with Grove Press,’ in
Publishing Samuel Beckett, ed. by Mark Nixon, (The British Library Publishing Division:
London, 2011); ‘Rosset was tentative about the publication of Beckett’s novels, especially
Molloy, which he would use finally to test the limits of censorship in America. Cautioned by
Beckett and on the advice of his legal staff, Rosset published Molloy exclusively in hard cover,
its distribution restricted to New York City bookshops that had requested it…’ p. 141.
45
Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and the
Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, p. 1.
46
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of
a Countercanon,’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction, ‘Grove Press Number,’ Vol X, No. 3,
(Fall, 1990), p. 8.
47
See Robert Coover’s ‘Preface’ in John Hawkes, The Lime Twig, Second Skin, Travesty,
(Penguin: New York, 1996), p. xi.
14 J. BAXTER
world,’48 presenting a significant gateway into the subject of Beckett’s

American legacies at the height of the countercultural 60s.
Along with Coover, writers of postmodern metafiction such as Donald
Barthelme, John Barth, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick and
William H. Gass would each find Beckett’s torturous self-consciousness
and caustic irony to be vital ingredients in forging new paths out of what
Barth describes as the ‘apocalyptic ambience’49 of the late 1960s.
Anticipating the centrality of gallows humour in the new American fiction,
Edward Albee states the appeal of Beckett and the European absurd as
‘free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic and often wildly, wildly funny’50 (Albee’s
Zoo Story would go on to premiere alongside Krapp’s Last Tape in January
1960, with the full text appearing in the pages of Evergreen later that
year). On the subject of the ‘American absurd,’ Charles B. Harris notes
the incapacity of fiction ‘to portray absurdity effectively in a world which
already accepts absurdity as a basic premise.’51 Harris gestures towards the
acceleration of unreality in the wake of the 1963 Kennedy assassination
and the spectacle of the first televised war in Vietnam52—a world, as
Beckett’s Malone states, locked in a ‘thousand absurd postures’ (220). In
the preface to the influential anthology Black Humor, Bruce Jay Friedman
notes ‘a nervousness, a tempo, a near hysterical new beat in the air.’53
Featuring a short play by Albee (‘The Sandbox’), fiction by Joseph Heller,
James Purdy and Kurt Vonnegut, the anthology would memorably open
with an excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V (1963). Describing
48
Robert Coover, ‘The Last Quixote: Marginal Notes on the Gospel According to Samuel
Beckett,’ New American Review, No. 11, (1971), p. 135.
49
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-
Fiction, (Johns Hopkins University Press: London, 1988), p. 72.
50
Edward Albee, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One?’ in New York Times, (February 25,
1962), http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/15/specials/albee-absurd.html?mcubz=0
51
Charles Harris, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, (College and University
Press: New Haven, 1971), p. 19; Harris significantly draws from Philip Roth’s celebrated
1961 essay ‘Writing American Fiction,’ in which Roth laments ‘the actuality’ that is ‘continu-
ally outdoing our talents.’ p. 18.
52
For Larry McCaffrey, the Kennedy assassination serves as the inaugural event in which
postmodernism was ‘ushered in—at least in the United States—since that was the day that
symbolically signalled the end of a certain kind of optimism and naiveté in our collective
unconsciousness.’ Larry McCaffrey, Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide,
(Greenwood: New York, 1986), p. xii.
53
Quoted in Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, (St
Martin’s Press: New York, 2009), p. 201.
the application of plastic surgery in excruciating and grotesque detail,

Pynchon would rapidly become one of the preeminent figures of American
postmodernism, whose berserk, multi-stranded narratives betray idiosyn-
cratic debts to the wandering picaresque of Jack Kerouac, the grandilo-
quent pessimism of T.S. Eliot and the puerile irreverence of Mad Magazine.
An avowed reader of Evergreen, Pynchon’s shaggy novels also stage an
indirect relation to Beckett’s taught, entropic narratives that will be
explored at greater length later in this book.
Interrogating the impact of mass society over the high modernist proj-
ect, Irving Howe is widely considered to be the first to introduce the term
postmodernism into the field of American letters.54 In subsequent decades,
critics such as Leslie Fielder and Ihab Hassan provide the category with
much of its giddy and celebratory resonance. Parsing postmodernism’s
field of lively incongruities, Hassan evokes the anxious rapprochement
between ‘pop and silence, or mass culture and deconstruction, or Superman
and Godot.’55 Throughout this study, the stark austerity of Beckett’s ever-
more insular post-60s narratives often awkwardly rub shoulders with works
whose flirtation with the modernist avant-garde also leaves room for flam-
boyant performance and the parodic incorporation of pop culture images.
At the same time, the provocations of postmodern and proto-postmodern
authors also betray the limits of a literary scene grounded in a predomi-
nantly male-orientated subculture (defining a postmodern ‘literature of
silence,’ Hassan would tellingly foreground Grove’s masculine literary
icons Beckett and Miller). This will be explored later in this study against
the background of Grove’s precipitous decline during the 1970s. In Kate
Millet’s landmark work of feminist theory Sexual Politics (1970), the
misogynistic narratives of Grove authors such as Henry Miller and Norman
Mailer would come under fierce attack, posing difficult questions over the
increasingly salacious output of the American publisher. Broader charges
around the perceived myopia of postmodern fiction are levelled by writers
such as Joyce Carol Oates who laments a situation in which ‘for many years
our most promising writers have lined up obediently behind Nabokov,
Beckett and Borges, to file through a doorway marked THIS WAY OUT.’56
54
See Irving Howe, ‘Mass Culture and Postmodern Fiction,’ in Partisan Review, (Summer
1959), pp. 420–436.
55
Ihab Hassan, Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, (Ohio State
University Press: Columbus, 1988), p. 86.
56
Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Whose Side Are You On?’ in New York Times, (June 4, 1972),
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/oates-side.html?mcubz=0
16 J. BAXTER
Notes on Methodology: Postmodernism,

Post-Beckett?
What follows is a few brief theoretical considerations that impact upon this
study’s analysis of Beckett’s legacies in America and its return to postmod-
ernism’s Escherean corridors.
In 1987’s Postmodern Fiction, Brian McHale argues that ‘nothing
about this term [“postmodernist”] is unproblematic.’57 Offering a brief
survey of postmodernism’s competing definitions, from the ironic refor-
mulations of John Barth’s ‘Literature of Exhaustion’ to Jean-François
Lyotard’s widely circulated statement of the ‘incredulity towards meta-
narratives,’ McHale signals postmodernism’s dissatisfying looseness,
reflected in its unwillingness to stand as a coherent programme in its
own right.
This conceptual problem is further compounded by a writer like
Beckett whose corpus historically straddles both modernist and post-
modernist schemes of periodization and has been enlisted to justify the
claims of both critical models. In Fredric Jameson’s influential analysis,
Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989),
Beckett’s works anticipate the waning historicity of postmodernism as a
(significantly American) cultural dominant while also resisting attempts
to neatly fall within the purview of postmodern poetics. Jameson names
Beckett, alongside Nabokov, Charles Olson and Louis Zukovsky, as
authors ‘who had the misfortune to span two eras and the luck to find a
time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable
forms.’58 Jameson’s analysis echoes that of critics Hassan and McHale, in
positioning Beckett’s writing in suspended relation to modernist and
postmodernist models. On this point McHale situates the novels of the
Beckett Trilogy in implicit union with the ‘limit modernism’ of Vladimir
Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Carlos Fuentes’ Change of Skin (1967) and
Thomas Pynchon’s V, as works in which the epistemological questions of
modernism (‘what is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they
know it, and with what degree of certainty?’) are overtaken by the onto-
logical questions of postmodernism (‘what is a world? What kinds of
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, (Methuen: New York, 1987), p. 3.

57
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Verso:

58
London, 1991), p. 305.

world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?’59).
Scholars such as Tyrus Miller and Alan Wilde have subsequently written
of Beckett as an exemplary author of late modernism suggesting an
extended pocket of belatedness within the ‘random stylistic allusion’60
that otherwise characterizes Jameson’s postmodernity.61 By proceeding
to investigate Beckett’s legacies in American fiction, this study will eschew
the desire to reduce Beckett’s texts to instrumentally modernist or post-
modernist identities. At the same time, several of the following chapters
entail views on Beckett as either quintessentially postmodern or privilege
the author as an almost unparalleled medium for modernism’s last gasps.
Without running afoul of ‘the neatness of identifications,’62 the pursuit of
Beckett’s textual legacies in this book will also allow room for the ways in
which Beckett’s writing is strikingly adopted, reshaped, collided with and
challenged.
Returning to the intense draw of Beckett’s texts over disparate visions
of the postmodern, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies will reframe this theoretical
problem as one that intersects with questions concerning Beckett’s
reception in America and the intractable difficulties of writing in Beckett’s
wake. While much scholarship exists on writing after Beckett—including
notable volumes such as Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (2013) and a
special issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2010)—his influence
over American fiction is treated noticeably lightly (individual essays on
Paul Auster and Don DeLillo have appeared in Beckett’s Literary Legacies
[2007] and have been valuable to the development of key chapters).
Peter Boxall’s far-reaching account of Beckett’s legacies Since Beckett:
Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) has been particularly influen-
tial over this study, opening with the pithy observation that Beckett’s
writing constitutes both a ‘poetics of exhaustion, and a poetics of
persistence.’63 Boxall remains attuned to the manner in which the con-
tested space of the Beckett text establishes the paradoxical terms through
59
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, (Methuen: New York, 1987), p. 12.
60
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 18.
61
See Alan Wilde who argues that ‘late modernism interposes a space of transition, a neces-
sary bridge between more spacious and self-conscious experimental movements.’ Quoted in
Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars,
(University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999), p. 11.
62
Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,’ in Disjecta, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Calder:
London, 1983), p. 19.
63
Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, p. 2.
18 J. BAXTER
which his legacies must be dissected. This is epitomized in the final apo-
retic words of 1953’s The Unnamable: ‘You must go on, I can’t go on,
I’ll go on’; as Boxall forcefully argues, ‘any attempt to understand or to
inherit Samuel Beckett’s legacy has to reckon at the outset with this con-
tradiction between a writing which continues to go on, and a writing
which is unable to go on.’64 The wilful elision between moments of end-
ing and continuity returns throughout this study in conversation with
American authors. Betraying a distinct postmodern flavour, the pressure
of Beckett’s self-extinguishing voices go on to be celebrated through
literary pastiche in writing by Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, John
Barth and Lydia Davis. This motivates the decision to ground the fol-
lowing study in close relation to Beckett’s prose texts, providing detailed
close readings which dictate the terms for writing in the post-Beckett
idiom. As Boxall writes, one of Beckett’s chief legacies is ‘a conception of
legacy itself, a conception of influence’—through which Beckett’s text is
less likely to be perceived as a Bloomian father to be slain, than a possibil-
ity to be glimpsed.65
Moving forward, the broader difficulties at work in bridging Beckett’s
isolated narratives ‘in a head’ (Malone Dies, 251) and the grand vectors
of history return in often surprising ways. Boxall’s reading owes much to
Theodor Adorno’s celebrated essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’
where the Frankfurt School philosopher embarks upon the fraught
attempt to historicize the exhaustion of history at work in Beckett’s
drama. For Adorno, Endgame serves as the last possibility for intransi-
gent modernism following the barbarity of Auschwitz, in which the
reader glimpses the ineradicable connection between historical and intel-
lectual waste. Like Adorno, Boxall engages in the difficulty of retrieving
scraps of history from Beckett’s minimalism, pointing to Don DeLillo’s
large novels as a possible site of collision for the arrested potential of
Beckettian narrativity in American postmodernity. In particular, DeLillo
embodies a tendency in this book towards legacies of a surprisingly
expansive quality, returning to narratives of abundance by contrast with
Beckett’s ‘lessness.’ However, just as Beckett’s writing demonstrates the
uncanny quality towards regeneration through exhaustion (as Russell
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid. p. 16.
Smith aptly states, ‘by ending repeatedly, they fail to end definitively’66),
DeLillo’s novels retain pockets of calm within their packed narrative
structures. In the ‘Afterword’ to the historical epic Underworld (1997),
a period of evacuated concentration is preserved in the ‘blank space’ of
the wall that animates the writer ‘during the dead times’ (829). This
tendency to return to moments of generative quiet is anticipated in
DeLillo’s early black comedy End Zone (1972) with protagonist Gary
Harkness’ engagements in the systemized violence of American football
spilling into the ascetic drive towards ‘simplicity, repetition, solitude,
starkness, discipline upon discipline’ (30).
As such, several chapters of this study will embrace the possibilities of
reading Beckett against the grain, advancing the underexplored, but strik-
ing, relationship between the worldly emptiness of Beckett and the post-
modern inclination towards increasingly baroque maximalism. This will be
primarily conducted through reference to the striking Beckettian debts of
Pynchon and DeLillo: named by David Cowart as the ‘mythic cousins of
American postmodernism.’67 Dramatizing the proliferative nature of con-
spiratorial plotting, and the destabilizing influx of consumer bric-a-brac,
both authors come up against the insufficiency of language and redun-
dancy of expression, wracked by the dilemma of Molloy in saying either
‘too much or too little’ (34). Moving beyond the wartime ruins through
which Adorno understands the ghastly muteness of Beckett’s modernism,
this study will instead take flight to the overlit shores of American post-
modernism; as a result, the tenor may be closer to Fredric Jameson’s
description of ‘something grim and impending within the polluted sun-
shine of the shopping mall—some older, European-style sense of doom
and crisis.’68 A similarly ‘polluted’ sunshine is evoked by Pynchon in The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966), during the nightmare of lachrymose former
used-car salesman Mucho Mass: ‘I’d be going about a normal day’s busi-
ness and suddenly, with no warning, there’d be the sign. We were a
member of the National Automobile Dealers’ Association. N.A.D.A. Just
this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada against the blue sky’ (100).
66
Russell Smith, ‘Beckett’s Endlessness: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern
Sublime,’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 14, After Beckett, (2004), p. 405.
67
David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, (University of Georgia Press:
Athens, 2002), p. 7.
68
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno: Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, (Verso:
London, 1990), p. 248.
20 J. BAXTER
Beginning in 1957 with Beckett’s first appearance in the Evergreen

Review, each chapter of this study will move gradually towards the new
millennium and the end of postmodernism’s critical purchase. By ana-
lysing Beckett’s appearances in the Grove magazine, Chap. 2 finds the
author drawn into the melting pot of post-war American writing. This
long chapter will provide detailed readings of the 17 issues in which
original Beckett texts are printed, highlighting Evergreen as a valuable
document of Beckett’s American reception and as a catalysing influence
over key developments in American fiction. We will pay close attention
to the metamorphosis of the magazine, and the governing philosophy
of Barney Rosset, moving from the ‘vulgar modernism’69 of early issues
to the more controversial and salacious postmodern ‘underground’ of
the mid-60s. Throughout each section, more general discursive shifts
symptomatic of a new postmodernist paradigm will be perceived:
including the primacy of the reader, the post-war regeneration of a play-
ful avant-gardism and the difficult relationship between the high-artis-
tic and serious heritage of modernism against an ironic and breezy
postmodernism.
Both Chaps. 3 and 4 offer panoramic views into Beckett’s legacies
within the first wave of American postmodernism. In Chap. 3, Beckett’s
influence will be studied alongside the acrobatic and absurd short fiction
of Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme. Across a series of interviews
(and the occasional in-text cameo appearance), Beckett’s textual associa-
tion with forms of ending and exhaustion re-emerge as surprisingly affir-
mative ingredients in postmodern metafiction. In a 1972 essay, Coover
points to the significant impact of reading Beckett in the pages of Evergreen,
highlighting the scatological humour and negative style of Beckett’s
Trilogy and the Texts for Nothing as key influences over his own wildly
flamboyant production. Elsewhere, Donald Barthelme frames Beckett as
an important touchstone over his highly stylised narrative fragments, while
articulating the significant ‘problem’ for authors to write something that
surpasses Beckett—as Beckett surpasses Joyce. These individual studies
will be placed against late-60s aesthetic debates surrounding the possibil-
ity of the American avant-garde, with a focus on John Barth’s 1969 essay
‘The Literature of Exhaustion.’
Chapter 4 will go on to consider the highly suggestive, albeit indirect,
legacies that Beckett casts over the career of Thomas Pynchon. Like many
69
Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon, p. 123.
of his generation, Pynchon would point to Evergreen as an eye-opening

and exciting glimpse of literature beyond the strictures of academicized
modernism. At a first glance, exemplary postmodern texts such as Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973) gesture towards an altogether more Joycean inheritance,
with Beckett’s career marked by the tendency towards smaller narrative
figures, and Pynchon’s novels expanding outwards in seemingly limitless
modes of narrative accumulation. While little sustained criticism exists on
this legacy, this chapter will build on suggestive references throughout
Beckett and Pynchon scholarship, in particular John P. Harrington’s strik-
ing essay concerning the shared thematic obsessions of both authors with
a focus on entropy as a governing metaphor of effortless order and spiral-
ling chaos.
Stretching from the 1970s, through to the 2000s, Chap. 5 will consider
Beckett’s writing alongside the output of Don DeLillo. Concerns with
postmodern world-building and expansion are strikingly echoed in
DeLillo’s assertion of Beckett’s legacy as ‘among the last to have built a
universe—Beckett’s “world”—in which in which his readers could be said
to “live”’; by contrast, DeLillo states ‘in the post-Beckett era […] it is the
other way around: writers are somehow sucked into the world surround-
ing theirs.’70 Branching off from Boxall’s productive scholarship concern-
ing the authors’ generative textual relationship, this chapter will take a
closer look into Beckett’s uneasy place within the proliferation of nuclear
metaphor and the diminished possibilities of countercultural writing as
represented in novels such as End Zone, Underworld and Mao II (1991).
This chapter will also consider DeLillo’s turn to more recognizably
Beckettian, minimalist forms in recent decades and the thematization of
empty spaces as a focal point for residual modernist influences.
In Chap. 6, Beckett’s post-millennial legacies will be considered by
turning to the later works of Paul Auster and Lydia Davis. Arguably the
most publicly recognized Beckettian writer in America, Auster, would play
a major role as general editor of the Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett’s
writing, released in celebration of the 2006 centenary year. Writing in the
‘Editors Note,’ Auster introduces the Grove volumes that include ‘the
works on which Samuel Beckett’s reputation rests’; ‘from the dazzling
early essay on Proust, to the revolutionary Waiting for Godot, from the
uproarious prose of Watt, to the austere minimalism of How it is, from the
70
Quoted in Christian Moraru, ‘Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the “Lethal”
Reading,’ The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), p. 198.
22 J. BAXTER
poetic murmurs of Texts for Nothing, to the tender, heart-breaking

Company…’; ‘Open anywhere and begin reading.’71 Dovetailing with the
centenary celebrations, it will be suggested that the novella Travels in the
Scriptorium (2006) strikingly reinvents the auto-fictional impulses of the
late Beckett novella Company. This chapter will also address Lydia Davis
whose highly singular body of work betrays a profound affinity with the
procrastinatory narratives of Beckett’s Trilogy. Existing at the loaded
intersection of European late modernism, 1980s minimalism and post-
modern metafiction, Davis thematizes the problematics of writing and
translation while parodying the occasionally ponderous weight of mod-
ernist legacies in late stories such as ‘Southward Bound, Reads
Worstward Ho.’
While this book often returns to the textual impediments characteristic
of Beckett’s writing—wracked by a ‘fixity of mystery’ (Watt, 198)—
Beckett’s treatment in American fiction is also remarkable for its elasticity,
serving as a vast reservoir of metaphor and analogy: through hobbled
Quixotes, intimations of impending nuclear apocalypse and the galling
‘nowhere’ of desert spaces. In turn, Beckett’s name re-emerges as some-
thing altogether more free-floating, multiform and postmodern. To
Edward Beckett, Barney Rosset would defend his decision to publish
Eleutheria (the elder Beckett’s first complete theatrical work) characteriz-
ing Beckett as a ‘changing, growing, swaying, marvellous organism always
in a state of transformation.’72 In this spirit, Chap. 7 will consider the
‘howling success’ of Beckett’s revivifying failure alongside his endurance
as a deracinated ‘postmodern icon.’ Despite the waning relevance of post-
modernism in recent years, this concluding chapter will investi-
gate Beckett’s purchase over those writing in its wake, culminating in a
short analysis of posthuman futurity in DeLillo’s Zero K (2016).
References
Albee, Edward, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One?’ in New York Times, (February
25, 1962), http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/15/specials/albee-
absurd.html?mcubz=0
71
Paul Auster, ‘Editor’s Note,’ in The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett, (Grove
Press: New York, 2006), p. vii.
72
Barney Rosset to Edward Beckett, April 22, 1993, in Dear Mr. Beckett – Letters from the
Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File, (Opus: New York, 2017), p. 422.
Atkinson, Brooks, ‘Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,”’ in New York Times, (April 20,
1956), http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-godot.
html?mcubz=0
———, ‘Beckett’s “Endgame,”’ in New York Times, (January 29, 1958), http://
www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/r eviews/beckett-e ndgame.
html?mcubz=0
Auster, Paul, ‘Editor’s Note,’ in The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett,
(Grove Press: New York, 2006)
Bair, Deidre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1978)
Barth, John, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion,’ in The Friday Book: Essays and Other
Non-Fiction, (Johns Hopkins University Press: London, 1988)
Beckett, Samuel, Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirring Still, (Faber:
London, 2009)
———, ‘On Endgame,’ in Disjecta, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Calder: London, 1983)
———, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, (Borzoi: New York, 1997)
———, The Complete Dramatic Works, (Faber: London, 1986)
———, Watt, (Faber: London, 2009)
Begam, Richard, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, (Stanford University
Press: Stanford, 1996)
Bentley, Eric, ‘The Talent of Samuel Beckett,’ in Samuel Beckett: Waiting for
Godot: a Casebook, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Macmillan: London, 1987)
Bianchini, Natka, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, (Palgrave Macmillan:
New York, 2015)
Blau, Herbert, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern, (Indiana University
Press: Bloomington, 1987)
Boxall, Peter, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism,
(Continuum: New York, 2009)
Coover, Robert, ‘The Last Quixote: Marginal Notes on the Gospel According to
Samuel Beckett,’ New American Review, No. 11, (1971)
Cowart, David, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, (University of Georgia Press:
Athens, 2002)
Daugherty, Tracy, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, (St Martin’s
Press: New York, 2009)
Dear Mr. Beckett: Letters from the Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File, ed. by Lois
Oppenheim, (Opus: New York, 2017)
DeLillo, Don, End Zone, (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1972)
———, Underworld, (Picador: London, 1998)
Epstein, Joseph, ‘If Books About Him Continue, He Will Rank With Christ,
Napoleon and Wagner,’ New York Times, (November 25, 1973) http://www.
nytimes.com/1973/11/25/archives/if-books-about-him-continue-he-will-
rank-with-christ-napoleon-and.html?mcubz=1
24 J. BAXTER
Glass, Loren, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and the
Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2013)
Gontarski, S.E., ‘Art and Commodity: Beckett’s Commerce with Grove Press,’ in
Publishing Samuel Beckett, ed. by Mark Nixon, (The British Library Publishing
Division: London, 2011)
———, ‘Beckett’s Reception in the USA,’ in The International Reception of
Samuel Beckett, ed. by Mark Nixon, Matthew Feldman, (Continuum:
London, 2009)
———, ‘Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of
a Countercanon,’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction, ‘Grove Press Number,’
Vol X, No. 3, (Fall, 1990)
———, ‘Film and Formal Integrity,’ in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives,
(Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1983)
———, Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn, (Bloomsbury:
London, 2018)
———, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America,’ in A Companion
to Samuel Beckett, ed. by S.E. Gontarski, (Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, 2010)
Harris, Charles, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, (College and
University Press: New Haven, 1971)
Hassan, Ihab, Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, (Ohio
State University Press: Columbus, 1988)
Jameson, Fredric, Late Marxism: Adorno: Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, (Verso:
London, 1990)
———, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Verso:
London, 1991)
Kalb, Jonathan, ‘American Playwrights on Beckett,’ in PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, (January 2007)
Kennedy, Seán, ‘Does Beckett Studies require a Subject? Memory and Mourning
in the Texts for Nothing,’ in Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, ed. by
Katherine Weiss, Sean Kennedy, (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009)
Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, (Bloomsbury:
London, 1996)
Mailer, Norman, Advertisements for Myself, (Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, 1992)
Miller, Tyrus, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World
Wars, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999)
McCaffrey, Larry, Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, (Greenwood:
New York, 1986)
McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, (Methuen: New York, 1987)
Moraru, Christian, ‘Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the “Lethal”
Reading,’ The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 27, No. 2, (Spring, 1997)
No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider,
ed. by Maurice Harmon, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1998)
Oates, Joyce Carol, ‘Whose Side Are You On?’ in New York Times, (June 4, 1972),
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/oates-s ide.
html?mcubz=0
Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49, (Vintage: London, 1996)
Rosset, Barney, Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, (O/R:
New York, 2016)
CHAPTER 2
Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett

and the American ‘Underground’
It is impossible to dissociate Beckett’s American legacy from the cultural

impact of Barney Rosset’s Grove Press in the 1960s and 1970s. Issuing
works by fellow late modernists such as Jean Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet,
Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter, the publisher would be instrumental
in bringing the European avant-garde—with Beckett as its figurehead—
into the foreground of the turbulent literary scene of the United States.
Defined by permissive sexuality and the commercial success of formerly
‘obscene’ texts such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928),
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961) and William Burroughs’ Naked
Lunch (1964), many of Rosset’s prized authors would be repackaged as
icons of the Grove sponsored avant-garde; the same texts would signifi-
cantly inform the mood of the 1960s counterculture, achieving notoriety
as dispatches of the, significantly male-orientated, ‘underground.’ It is
against this background that Beckett would emerge as an author vital to
the Grove reinvention of modernist avant-gardism within a promiscu-
ous—and it will be suggested postmodern—paradigm. From their initial
correspondence, Rosset would announce that ‘what the Grove Press
needed most in the world was Samuel Beckett.’1 By the posthumous
publication of Rosset’s unfinished memoir in 2017, he would
1
Rosset to Beckett, June 18, 1953, The Grove Press Reader 1951–2001, ed. by
S.E. Gontarski, (Grove Press: New York, 2001), p. 26.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Baxter, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction, New
Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81572-1_2
28 J. BAXTER
commemorate the English translation of Waiting for Godot (released by

Grove Press in 1954) as ‘the most important single book we were ever to
publish.’2
Recent publications3 have helped to further reinforce the Beckett-
Grove connection, shining a light on what S.E. Gontarski regards as a
‘critical blind spot’4 in the otherwise crowded field of Beckett studies.
Preceding the publication of Rosset’s memoir, the release of Dear Mr.
Beckett (2016), edited by Lois Oppenheim and curated by Astrid Meyers
Rosset, provides a colourful entry point through interviews and corre-
spondence, invoking an epistolary relationship that ‘seemed to float on a
sea of tranquillity and trust.’5 Elsewhere, Loren Glass’ invaluable
Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and the
Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (2013) has provided detailed insight
into the tempestuous history of the publishing house, as well as Beckett’s
uncontested position as a key Grove author. While this chapter remains
indebted to these studies, there remains little sustained scholarship into
the striking effects of Grove as a catalyst for American writers’ engagement
with Beckett. As Glass reminds us, Grove became ‘a conduit through
which the cultural capital of European late modernism flowed into the
United States, ballasting the emergence of an indigenous American avant-
garde.’6 In later chapters, postmodern authors such as Robert Coover,
Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster will testify to the significance of Grove
Press and the in-house journal Evergreen Review, as rebellious outposts in
post-war publishing, giving shape to their writerly tendencies and literary
tastes. As a profitable enterprise, Grove would peak in 1969 with $14 mil-
lion in net sales—a commercial apex that would strikingly overlap with the
countercultural ‘seedbed’7 in which American postmodernism would
2
Rosset, Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, p. 156.
3
See Bianchini’s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, as well as S.E. Gontarski’s volume
Beckett criticism, Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism, (Edinburgh University
Press: Edinburgh, 2016); Rosset’s legacy and his role as a key disseminator of late modern-
ism is also addressed in recent documentaries such as Barney’s Wall: Portrait of a Game
Changer, dir. Sandy Gotham Meehan, (Foxhog: 2017) and Notfilm, dir. Ross Lipman,
(Milestone: 2016).
4
S. E. Gontarski, ‘Foreword,’ in Stephen John Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Market
place, p. xii.
5
Dear Mr. Beckett, p. 47.
6
7
David R. Shumway, ‘Countercultures,’ in The Cambridge History of Postmodern
Literature, ed. by Brian McHale, (Cambridge University Press: Cleveland, 2016), p. 112.
2 EVERGREEN REVIEW, 1957–1984: BECKETT AND THE AMERICAN… 29
eventually take root. For this reason, the presence of Beckett as a mainstay
of the Grove backlist serves as a pragmatic foundation—if not a fixed point
of origin—for many of the legacies enumerated hereafter.
In order to effectively situate Beckett within the Grove-nexus, this
chapter will foreground the Evergreen Review, which, perhaps more than
any individual Grove title, dramatizes Beckett’s extension into post-war
America. Published by Grove Press between 1957 and 1973, Evergreen8
would represent a common venue for works by Beckett, as well as inno-
vative writing by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Coover and
Kathy Acker, among others. Beginning modestly as a small quarterly
paperback, selling for $1, the review rapidly became a vehicle connecting
Grove’s favoured authors and a mass audience of educated readers. With
an initial print run of 3000 copies, Evergreen mirrored the democratic
aspirations of paperback periodicals New Directions Anthology and New
American Review; pointing to their comparatively high circulation,
Beverly Gross alludes to the populist imperative of the ‘publishers peri-
odicals,’ a special category of little magazine that ‘exist to be marketed.’9
Accordingly, Evergreen would be listed alongside the Grove backlist of
affordable ‘quality’ paperbacks—including the publisher’s line of
‘Evergreen Originals’—reinforcing Grove’s brand of mass-market avant-
gardism. As we will see, this would be amplified through various format
changes throughout the lifetime of the review. The inclusion of advertis-
ing from No. 6 (Autumn, 1958) was followed by the transition into a
bi-monthly publication with No. 9 (Summer, 1959). By No. 32 (April–
May, 1964), Evergreen had been radically transformed into a popular,
glossy magazine, cosmetically resembling 1960s men’s magazines such
as Esquire and Playboy. During this time, Evergreen itself would come to
represent a postmodern object, embodying what David R. Shumway
regards as Grove’s ‘postmodern mix of heterogenous political
8
Hereafter, Evergreen Review will be abbreviated to Evergreen. References to the
‘Evergreen Originals’ imprint (along with ‘Evergreen Theatre,’ ‘Evergreen Film’ and
‘Evergreen Gallery’) will remain unabbreviated and unitalicized. Please note the potential for
confusion regarding No. 32 (April–May, 1964) in which the title of the publication is simi-
larly truncated to Evergreen. This change is referenced in the opening to the second section
of this chapter: 1964–1967: Postmodernism, or the Populist ‘Underground’.
9
Beverly Gross, ‘Culture and Anarchy: Whatever Happened to Lit Magazines?’ in The
Antioch Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, (Spring, 1969), p. 44.
30 J. BAXTER
radicalism, avant-garde aesthetics and explicit and deviant sexuality.’10

Featuring commentary on film, erotica, reporting from the New Left as
well as the publisher’s highly publicized obscenity battles, the new for-
mat offered an unparalleled glimpse into the wider ecosystem of Rosset’s
diverse preoccupations.
It is into this carnivalesque fabric that Beckett’s characteristically retiring
works are also drawn. Throughout its first 16 years (and in subsequent
revivals in 1984, 1998 and 2017), the Grove review emerged as a vital arm
of the enthusiastic marketing of Beckett promulgated by Rosset through-
out the 1960s. Printed in 17 issues,11 including the magazine’s 1957 debut
and the final issue of its initial run in 1973, Beckett’s unique status as the
only writer to appear in the first and last issues would be acknowledged by
Rosset as a testament to the long-standing relationship between the author
and the Grove review.12 Between these years, the entire spectrum of
Beckett’s production would be accounted for: featuring drama, short sto-
ries, poetry, a novel fragment, as well as experiments for radio and televi-
sion. Of these appearances, Evergreen would go on to boast a number of
American firsts—most notably, the international debut publication of
Krapp’s Last Tape in No. 5 (Summer, 1958)—advertised prominently as ‘a
new monodrama from the author of Waiting for Godot and Endgame.’ In
relation to this particular coup, Rosset would write to the author that ‘both
Alan [Schneider] and my EVREV (sic) co-editor [Donald Allen] are krap-
ping their hands in joy over Krapp.’13 Representing a key moment of what
Nicolas Zurbrugg labels ‘pubescent postmodernism,’14 No. 5 will be high-
lighted as particularly noteworthy with the publication of Beckett’s play,
alongside writing by Kerouac, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, reflections
on nuclear warfare, and the subcultural mythography of James Dean.
Overall, the prevalence of Beckett’s image and writing in advertisements,
critical essays and cartoons reflects a general investment in the author as a
quintessential component of the Evergreen brand. By 1970, Beckett’s sta-
tus as a Nobel Laureate would be used to sell the 13-volume Grove edition
10
David R. Shumway, ‘Countercultures,’ p. 116.
11
This figure diverges from the incomplete bibliography of 15 issues provided in Dear Mr.
Beckett.
12
Barney Rosset, ‘Introduction,’ in Evergreen Review Reader: 1967–1973, (Four Walls:
New York, 1998), p. 11
13
Rosset to Beckett, March 28, 1958, Dear Mr. Beckett, p. 140.
14
Nicolas Zurbrugg, ‘“Within a Budding Grove”: Pubescent Postmodernism and the
Early Evergreen Review,’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction, No. 10, (Fall, 1990).
of The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett, advertised in No. 80 (July, 1970)

as ‘the most astonishing body of work in modern literature’ (12).
As such, this chapter will situate Evergreen as a vital document for
negotiating Beckett’s place within the wider terrain of post-war American
letters. If No. 1 (1957) would strike a predominantly late modernist sen-
sibility, featuring early Beckett texts ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and poems
from the Echo’s Bones collection, No. 2 (1957), printed as a special issue
on the ‘San Francisco Scene,’ initiated Evergreen’s long-standing con-
nection with the Beat movement. Including a reprint of Ginsberg’s
epoch-defining ‘Howl,’ No. 2 would position Rosset as a leading pur-
veyor of exciting new developments in American writing. And yet, the
various strands of Rosset’s obsessions would often coalesce within the
same issue. For this reason, this chapter will move beyond the tempta-
tion, sometimes manifest in prior accounts, to treat Evergreen as sim-
ply a para-text of Rosset’s main publishing organ, instead privileging the
review for its diverse series of textual encounters. As Ken Jordan playfully
observes in the introduction to the Evergreen Review Reader: 1957–1966
(1968), ‘Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and the Fugs shared pages with
Kerouac, Mailer, Beckett, and Burroughs, and essays propounding psy-
chedelia and Black Power.’15 The continuity of Beckett in this matrix
vindicates Evergreen editor Richard Seaver’s description of the author as
Grove’s ‘North Star’16; it also betrays his sometimes-uneasy alignment as
a member of the ‘underground’—established by Grove in the mid-1960s
as an influential marketing niche, encompassing subversive (often sexually
explicit) authors, together with readers, artists and activists. Predicated
on spontaneity and outspoken anti-authoritarianism, the alliance of
Evergreen with the countercultural ‘underground’ situates the outlet
as a potentially counterintuitive venue for Beckett as a ‘non-knower,’ a
‘non-caner.’17 Rosset would gently echo this sentiment: referring to the
‘incomprehensible’18 qualities of Beckett’s writing while also expressing
concern that his star author ‘wasn’t left enough.’19 This tension would
be memorably articulated in an interview with The Paris Review, alluding
15
Ken Jordan, ‘Introduction,’ in Evergreen Review Reader: 1957–1966, p. xi.
16
Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight, Paris in the 50s, New York in the 60s: A
Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York, 2012), p. 432.
17
James Knowlson, Images of Beckett, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2003), p. 30.
18
Dear Mr. Beckett, p. 222.
19
Ibid. p. 221.
32 J. BAXTER
to the distance between Beckett’s modernism and the countercultural

innovations of William Burroughs:
William Burroughs was a writer he [Beckett] particularly didn’t understand.

There is a famous anecdote about a meeting between Burroughs and
Beckett, which took place in Maurice Girodias’s restaurant. I remember sit-
ting next to Sam, while Burroughs, who worshipped Beckett, was explaining
to him how you do cut-ups. Beckett said to Bill, That’s not writing, that’s
plumbing. Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs were very unusual in the sense
that they understood that Beckett was important at that time. They wanted
him, almost desperately, to recognize them, and he just didn’t seem to con-
nect. It wasn’t dislike, it was just… nontogetherness.20
Rosset’s amusing anecdote connects Beckett’s American importance to

an instance of revelatory awkwardness. Painting a scene of stiff civility,
Beckett’s ‘nontogetherness’ rests upon a paradox of inarguable presence
and an intractable refusal to be neatly assimilated. The uncertainty of
Rosset’s tale would be further amplified through the competing accounts
of those present: including Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and Burroughs him-
self. In Burroughs’ account, the writer recalls the embarrassment of the
meeting, while also addressing a subsequent encounter with Beckett in
Berlin. ‘Beckett was polite and articulate. It was, however, apparent to me
at least that he had not the slightest interest in any of us, nor the slightest
desire ever to see any of us again.’21 Burroughs goes on to replicate
Beckett’s put-down of the cut-up technique, offering his own critique of
Beckett’s writing as ‘inhuman,’ devoid of time, memory and character.
Beckett, he suggests, ‘is perhaps the purest writer who has ever written.
There is nothing there but the writing itself.’22 Conflating both geograph-
ical and aesthetic distance, Burroughs connects his own stylistic departure
from Beckett to the chilly indifference of the encounter: ‘Beckett closes
off whole areas of experience. These areas simply don’t interest him. Like
our Berlin visit.’23
20
‘Barney Rosset: The Art of Publishing, No. 2,’ in The Paris Review, No. 145, (Winter
1997), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1187/barney-rosset-the-art-of-
publishing-no-2-barney-rosset
21
William Burroughs, ‘Beckett and Proust,’ in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays,
(Arcade: New York, 1985), p. 183.
22
Ibid. p. 185.
23
Ibid.
Indeed, Beckett and Burroughs become central figures of what

Gontarski identifies as Grove’s ‘broad based avant-gardism.’24 Sharing
pages in No. 22 (January–February, 1962) and No. 34 (November–
December, 1964), the catholicity of the review would impact the reorien-
tation of literary modernism towards a more sensational and commercially
minded mode. Rosset’s successes defending sexually explicit writing (cul-
minating in the 1966 paperback publication of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch)
would see formerly perverse works transformed into controversial bestsell-
ers. As a result, the publisher’s reputation would be immortalized on the
front cover for The Saturday Evening Post (January 25, 1969) under the
headline ‘how Barney Rosset publishes dirty books for fun and profit.’
Marrying the late modernist respectability of its catalogue with a populist
credo, Glass writes that Grove would be vital to the formation of a ‘vulgar
modernism’—‘notable for its vernacular aspirations and for its erotic
preoccupations.’25 As a precursor to the promiscuous sensibility of early
postmodernism, this instructive category will be expanded upon at greater
length later in this chapter. Reflecting these changes, Evergreen would
transition into a monthly publication by 1968, operating as an increasingly
commercial publication with a circulation of 125,000. By the end of the
decade, the perceived chauvinism of Evergreen and many Grove titles
would see Rosset come under fire from the burgeoning women’s libera-
tion movement. While Grove’s commitment to cutting-edge 1960s litera-
ture would lead to the publication of lauded figures such as Beckett and
Burroughs, one can also perceive the stark limits of the ‘underground’ as
a largely male-skewing project.
As Chap. 1 to this book has already stated, Beckett’s mid-century writ-
ing would be an important test-case for Rosset, wishing to gauge the
extent of acceptable publishing in America. In his first letter to the pub-
lisher, Beckett himself would warn Rosset of the possible difficulties of
publishing his structurally confrontational works. While no such difficulty
was encountered, Gontarski makes note of the unlikely alliance that
emerged between Beckett and Rosset, writing of a ‘shared distaste for
authority’ and a fondness for ‘revolutionary literature and avant-garde
visual art.’26 Where Rosset’s First Amendment fundamentalism was
sparked by an early encounter with Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Beckett’s
24
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,’ p. xiv.
25
26
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America,’ p. 25.
34 J. BAXTER
convictions were significantly aroused by his compatriot-in-exile Joyce.

Beckett’s attitude would be cultivated early, writing against the Irish
Censorship of Publications Act in the 1934 essay ‘Censorship in the
Saorstat,’ whereby definitions of vice and depravity would be emitted ‘as
the cuttle squirts ooze from its cod.’27 More pressingly, Beckett’s conflict
with the censor in the United Kingdom and Ireland would inform the
initially tentative approach towards his American publisher. Attuned to the
practical obstacles of ‘vulgar’ speech, Beckett would align with Rosset’s
more far-reaching publishing goals. For this reason, Zurbrugg points to
the author as one of the primary Evergreen ‘elders’28 situating Beckett
within a European prehistory of obscenity, citing Beckett’s transactions
with the expatriate Merlin group, consisting of Richard Seaver, Alexander
Trocchi, Austryn Wainhouse, Christopher Logue and Olympia publisher
Maurice Girodias. The role of the ‘Merlin juveniles’29 in rediscovering
Beckett’s long-unpublished second novel Watt—released as the first title
of Olympia’s ‘Collection Merlin’ imprint in 1953—is well established. By
1959, Seaver would make the transition to Grove Press as the managing
editor of Evergreen from No. 9—highlighting the more general flight of
authors from Girodias’ pariah outfit to the popular ‘underground’ of
Rosset’s enterprise. Alongside this, a number of Seaver’s translations of
Beckett’s works would be included in issues of the Grove review, reinforc-
ing Evergreen’s place within the post-war European conjuncture of mod-
ernism and vulgarity.
From issue to issue, the review provides a useful para-history of Beckett
in the United States: reflecting important publications of Beckett’s work
by Grove Press, as well as noteworthy performances, such as the interna-
tional debut of Happy Days in New York (1961), and Jessica Tandy’s
famous debut performance of Not I at the Lincoln Centre in 1972. At the
same time, the palpable ‘nontogetherness’ of select Beckett publications
sometimes leads to the juxtaposition of Beckett with popular comic strips
like Barbarella, as well as voluble dispatches from the student-led New
Left. Glass writes how the Grove project ‘did not rely on any coherent
theory or philosophy of the avant-garde’ but ‘inhered in a fundamental
27
Samuel Beckett, ‘Censorship in the Saorstat,’ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a
Dramatic Fragment, ed. by Ruby Cohn, (Calder: London, 1983), p. 84.
28
Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘“Within a Budding Grove” Pubescent Postmodernism and the
Early Evergreen Review,’ p. 155.
29
Quoted in Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (HarperCollins:
Glasgow, 1996), p. 429.
commitment to expanding the distribution of and access to what were

understood to be avant-garde texts in the United States.’30 In lieu of a
concrete editorial philosophy, Rosset’s knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism,
and staunch loyalty towards his favoured authors, would shape the charac-
ter of Evergreen and its somewhat-haphazard production.
Beginning with the early years of the paperback review, up to its reinven-
tion in 1964, Beckett’s publication history in Evergreen will be split into
three sections. The first will locate Beckett within the Grove review’s wider
negotiation of literary modernism and ‘vulgarity,’ bolstered by Rosset’s
numerous obscenity campaigns. The following section will focus on the
glossy and visually stimulating Evergreen magazine between 1964 and
1967, in which the review’s vulgar aesthetics are consolidated within
Rosset’s wide-ranging marketing campaign to ‘Join the Underground.’ It
will be argued that the simultaneously avant-garde and populist preoccupa-
tions of the ‘underground’ mark a significant site of postmodern conver-
gence with the freewheeling and improvisatory Grove project. Following
Evergreen’s turn to a monthly publication in 1968, the last section will
contend with the final years of the Grove review, responding to the devas-
tating effects of political fallout and economic decline. This includes the
strident feminist critique of the publisher’s increasingly exploitative output,
as well as contributing editor and student activist Carl Oglesby’s reflection
on the successes and failures of Rosset in giving form to ‘the whole subter-
ranean project which Grove Press was so much a part of…’ (No. 80, 16).
1957–1963: The Invention of ‘Vulgar Modernism’

Despite the dearth of editorial copy wedding Evergreen to a specific liter-
ary style, Rosset’s enthusiasm for Beckett’s writing would predominate
throughout the review’s early years. As the most published author of its
first volume—contributing 3 pieces, across 2 issues (covering 33 pages,
ahead of Ginsberg with 28 and Kerouac with 23)—Beckett’s presence
would be a governing factor in the Evergreen ecosystem: featuring fellow
Francophone authors, Robbe-Grillet and Ionesco, as well as representa-
tives of the Beat generation and the emergent ‘schools’ of American
poetry. Released out of the publisher’s small headquarters at 795 Broadway,
No. 1’s investment in the Eurocentric modernism of Beckett, Sartre and
Lawrence, would brush against American-based avant-gardes such as
30
36 J. BAXTER
Mississippi jazz—the latter disrupting, Rosset avers, Evergreen’s straight-

forwardly modernist sensibility.31 By No. 2’s famous issue on ‘The San
Francisco Scene,’ the review would channel the youthful spirit of its writ-
ers, promising ‘a new literary force,’ and ‘the fastest growing, most vigor-
ous literary magazine in America today.’32 Free of advertising up until No.
6 (Autumn, 1958), the first volumes, nonetheless, speak to the publisher’s
ambition for a quality production capable of attracting a wide readership,
with early thematic issues situating the Grove periodical at the global fron-
tier of new writing (see No. 7’s ‘The Eye of Mexico,’ [Winter, 1959], No.
13’s ‘What is Pataphysics?’ [May–June, 1960], No. 21’s ‘The German
Scene’ [November–December, 1961]). As such, this section will provide a
detailed account of the review during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in
which the publication’s populist and promiscuous sensibility begins to
take form. At the same time, it will be argued that one finds Beckett—a
regular fixture of the Grove review—tentatively repositioned as a subver-
sive, and at times ‘vulgar,’ figurehead of the Evergreen avant-garde. This
would be solidified in 1958, with the international debut publication
of Krapp’s Last Tape in No. 5, predicated on Rosset’s kinetic drive to
release the one-act play (the publisher’s favourite Beckett drama33), con-
solidating the author’s growing American readership.
In many senses, No. 1 provides an exemplary insight into the personal-
ity and flavour of the first two volumes of Evergreen. Describing the ‘fum-
bling’34 manner in which it began, co-editor Donald Allen, nevertheless,
points to the inclusion of Ionesco, Adamov and Beckett as evidence of the
initially modernist ideals of the early review.35 Featuring two Beckett pub-
lications—the early short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and ten poems,
reprinted from the 1935 Echo’s Bones collection—the author appears as a
31
‘We did Sartre and Beckett—ok that might fit. But Baby Dodds, jazz drummer?’—
‘Barney Rosset: The Art of Publishing, No. 2,’ in The Paris Review, No. 145, (Winter, 1997)
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1187/barney-rosset-the-art-of-publishing-
no-2-barney-rosset
32
Quotations taken from promotional material included at the back of No. 8,
(Spring, 1959).
33
In an interview with Jeff Sewald, Rosset states that ‘Krapp’s Last Tape was my favourite
thing Beckett did,’ comparing Beckett’s unreciprocated relationship with Ethna McCarthy
to his own ill-fated love affair with Nancy Ashenhurst, a fellow student from the Francis
Parker school—Barney Rosset, Dear Mr. Beckett: The Samuel Beckett File, p. 48.
34
S.E. Gontarski, ‘Don Allen: Grove’s First Editor,’ in The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
Vol. 10, No. 3, (Fall, 1990), p. 133.
35
Ibid. p. 134.
veritable bookend to the inaugural issue, printed as the second and final
items, respectively. While the back cover lauds ‘the famous author of
Waiting for Godot,’ there is little reference to Beckett’s contemporaneity,
represented almost entirely through the printed juvenilia. Likewise,
Beckett’s introduction in the contributors’ listings is minimal: accompa-
nied by Phillippe Carpentier’s stark black and white image of the author,
one reads that ‘he was born in Dublin, lives in Paris and writes in French.’
The Joycean effect of silence, exile and cunning is amplified further
through the framing of the texts themselves; bypassing the publication of
‘Dante…’ in the 1934 collection More Pricks Than Kicks by Chatto &
Windus, the listings call back to the text’s appearance in Edward Titus’
This Quarter in 1930. Pointing to Beckett’s heritage in the modernist lit-
tle magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, an implicit connection is drawn
between Evergreen and a wider history of specifically American expatriate
periodicals. Aping Eugene Jolas’ famous excoriation of the ‘plain reader,’36
Belacqua’s confrontation with the ‘impenetrable passage’ in Dante’s ‘first
of the canti in the moon’ places the issue in anxious continuity with a
‘golden age’ of modernist little magazines.
If Beckett can be genetically traced to the expatriate outlets of early
twentieth-century modernism, then there is also a counterfeit element to
Beckett’s modernist credentials within Evergreen. Despite the reference to
Titus’ little magazine in the contributors’ listings, the edition released in
No. 1 would be based upon a reprint of ‘Dante…’ from the volume More
Pricks Than Kicks, published four years afterwards by Chatto & Windus
(the photographic reprint of poems from Echo’s Bones would also consti-
tute a partial reproduction, omitting ‘Alba,’ ‘Malacoda’ and ‘Dortmunder’
from the collection). The absence of composition dates would be a chief
concern for Beckett: writing to Rosset that ‘authors are sensitive—fool-
ishly—of the chronos of their old vomit.’37 Marked by a somewhat slap-
dash sensibility, it can also be suggested that Evergreen resists the ‘chronos’
of Beckett’s writing: with the review increasingly a venue for loose ends,
translations-in-progress and uncollected items. The diffusion of Beckett’s
textual presence can be observed in light of the more frivolous character-
ization of ‘Dante…’ and the poems, respectively, as a ‘hilarious short
36
‘Proclamation (“Revolution of the Word,” June 1929),’ in Eugene Jolas: Critical
Writings, 1924–1951, (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2009), p.112.
37
Beckett to Rosset, April 6, 1957, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957–1965, ed. by Dan
Gunn, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2014), p. 39.
38 J. BAXTER
story’ and ‘a group of unusual poems.’ As we will see, Beckett’s comedy

would expedite the author’s passage into a nascent postmodernism, with
Beckett, as Leslie Fielder states, finding ‘it hard to escape being (what
some of his readers choose to ignore) compulsively and hilariously funny.’38
If Beckett’s appearance in No. 1 appears to place the author (and Evergreen
itself) in a line stretching back to modernist little magazines, then one can
also glimpse the more ludic flavour that would be perfected in later itera-
tions of the review. ‘Neither backward nor forward’ (24) Belacqua remarks
in ‘Dante…,’ inadvertently capturing the condition of the text, suspended
between a nostalgic modernism and a nascent postmodern impulse.
There are further intimations of Evergreen’s nascent populism elsewhere
in No. 1. Harold Feinstein’s front cover, providing a close-up of an attrac-
tive young woman, anticipates the more titillating production of later
issues. Published in the body of the magazine, Feinstein’s portfolio of
‘Eight Photographs’ concerning the Korean conflict also reinforces the
significance of Evergreen as a venue for outspokenly political photojour-
nalism. The overlap between aesthetic and political commitment is evi-
denced in the republication of Sartre’s essay ‘After Budapest’ (first
appearing in Paris Express, November 9, 1956). Opening No. 1, Sartre
expresses anguish at the Soviet Union’s violent repression of the Hungarian
Uprising, offering a caustic repudiation of socialism as a ‘Soviet-imported
product’ (8). This gives way to an early invocation of a speculative ‘new
left’ (20)—a political movement that would encompass ‘workers and small
business-men as well as intellectuals’ (21). Sartre’s activities in engagé
publishing would provide an important model for Richard Seaver39 (suc-
ceeding Donald Allen as Evergreen’s managing editor in 1959); as a pub-
lisher, Rosset would also come to embody the role of the ‘entrepreneur’ in
support of the avant-garde (‘we’re responsible to ourselves, our creative
people and our pocketbooks’40). Furthermore, the inclusion of the second
chapter from Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle provides a further
glimpse of the review’s fascination with early countercultural gestures. A
dispatch from transition (alongside Beckett), the second chapter of
Michaux’s autobiographical novel follows the Belgian writer’s experiences
38
Quoted in Postmodernism in American Literature: A Critical Anthology, ed. Manfred
Putz, Peter Freese, (Thesen Verlag: Berlin, 1984), p. 155.
39
Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight, p. 69.
40
Barney Rosset, ‘On Publishing,’ in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 3,
(Fall 1990), p. 58
Another random document with
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though we were certain, of course, that it had broken when the trawl
caught on a snag, it was no ragged break but a clean, sharp cut, as
though done by giant shears. That it was which touched us first with a
sense of mystery and awe. Around us was only the vast empty
panorama of sea and sky, but beneath us were three miles and more
of lightless waters, a vast gulf unpenetrated since the world's birth by
man or the science of man. We worked on, southward, feeling as
though under some strange spell. And then, shattering that spell,
came the thing which one of our trawls brought up on the morning of
the fifth day, the 11th.
"It was not so much in the trawl as on it, hanging from a corner as
though caught and brought up by the ascending trawl. It was a
machine, or part of a machine, a thing of shining metal about a foot in
each dimension. There was a framework of heavy metal rods, three
of them; inside were a chain of little gears and six slender tubes of
what seemed glass, with inside of each a red wire or thread. The
framework's three thick pillars were broken off sharp at the bottom, as
though the thing had been ripped by the trawl from some larger
machine, yet in itself the thing was a complete mystery. It was totally
unlike anything we had ever seen, the shining metal was a wholly
unfamiliar one, and the glasslike tubes, we found, were not glass but
a transparent metal of some sort. The thing was constructed, too,
with a strength and heaviness unusual in so small a mechanism. No
one on earth would construct it thus heavily; but suppose it had been
actually constructed at the sea's bottom from whence we had
dragged it, to resist the tremendous pressures there? What mysteries
could be lurking in the three miles of water below us?
"There was but one thing to do, to descend in the submarine for
further exploration, and after sending off a last message in which I
hinted of our discovery, without telling more lest the whole thing prove
a hoax, we began excited preparations for the descent. The deck-
fittings were dismantled, the heavy conning-tower doors clanged
shut, and a moment later the submarine's electric motors began to
hum and we slanted downward into the green waters, using both
ballast-tanks and diving-planes for our descent, and moving
downward in a great spiral.
"Gazing through the little port-holes in the control room, Dr. Lewis,
Captain Evans, the submarine's commander, and I watched the sunlit
waters outside darkening as we sank downward. In those waters
there turned and flashed the shoals of surface fishes, but as we
dropped on, these disappeared, giving way to other forms that we
could but vaguely make out in the darkening waters. By the time the
bathometric dial registered five hundred feet the darkness about us
was all but absolute, and a word of command turned on the great
under-sea searchlights, from which long lanes of golden light cut out
through the gloom about us.
"Still down we sank, in that great spiral course, until we had reached
a thousand feet, two thousand, a mile, a mile and a half. Now and
then we glimpsed great sea-creatures that blundered into the glow of
our lights, cephalopods and gasteropods, and now and then one of
the larger deep-sea crustaceans. Most of these, however, seemed to
flee from the brilliance of our lights, though in one case we caught
sight of a long, snaky form that could only have belonged to the
hydrophis family, though it was of unprecedented thickness and
length.
"The dial now registered a two-mile depth, and we snapped off the
submarine's lights, for in the waters about us were glowing the
phosphorescent creatures that lurk in these great depths. Floating by
in the darkness went here and there a Brisinga elegans, or luminous
starfish, its nineteen long tentacles glowing with misty light. The
snakelike stomias boa flashed past, the double rows of luminous
disks on the sides of its long body adding to the phosphorescent
brilliance. We made out, too, a squat, flat creature fully fifteen feet in
length, with great fanged mouth and luminous tail and fins, quite
unknown to the science of zoology, while scores of the rare
malacosteus niger, with its two headspots of greenish-gold light,
could be seen around us. Then, as we sank still farther downward,
the glowing phosphorescent forms about us thinned and vanished,
while about us lay a dark and almost lifeless region of waters.
"I turned to order the lights snapped on again, but stopped short at a
sudden cry from Lewis, at the port-hole beside me. He could not
speak, only pointing down in utmost excitement through the glass,
and as I too gazed down, awe and astonishment fell on me. For
glimmering up toward us from far below, through the dark waters, was
a faint white light, a strange, cold radiance that was growing rapidly
stronger as we dropped down toward it. In stunned silence we
watched, as our craft dipped down, and now at last we began to see
its source.
"A thousand feet below us there stretched an unimaginable scene. It
was the ocean's floor, a level, somewhat rolling plain, and on it, within
this vast region of white radiance, were grouped scores, hundreds,
thousands of strange structures, great globes of shining metal,
pierced by doorways, which were of uniform size, each being fully
three hundred feet in diameter. They were ranged in long streets or
avenues with mathematical precision. Away into the distance as far
as the eye could reach stretched this mighty city of globes, and I saw
that on the top of each globe was a small squat mechanism, like that
which our trawl had brought up but larger, and while these
mechanisms were not themselves luminous or shining, there sprang
from them in some way rays of white light which made it plain that it
was these which produced the strange white light that bathed all this
gigantic city.
"Our craft was slanting downward, toward and across the city as we
watched in awe, and as it did so we made out two things. The first
was that far away there was a spot at the city's heart where were no
globes, a vast, smooth-walled pit that seemed to sink down into the
sea's floor for an unguessable distance, and which I judged was fully
two miles in diameter. Near its edge there soared up above the
globes of the city, for fully two thousand feet, a slender tower of the
same shining metal, at whose tip was a small, bulb-like room. I
seemed to see, also, vague, great shapes that moved about this
tower, but at that moment my attention was shifted suddenly by
Lewis' exclamation to the city beneath us, and I saw for the first time
the people of that city.
"Through the streets, but a few hundred feet below us, now, there
moved countless numbers of black forms, creeping along the smooth,
metal-paved avenues like great black slugs. And as we dropped
closer toward them we saw that that was what they were—great slug-
people, their bodies thick cylinders of dark flesh, perhaps eight feet in
length and three in thickness, on which they crawled forward like
giant worm-things, their only limbs two short, thick flippers near the
head, their only sense-organs that we could see being two great,
dark, shining eyes like the eyes of an octopus—great slug-creatures,
inhabitants of the waters here at the sea's bottom, crawling through
this strange and awful city whose existence men have never dreamed
—a city at the bottom of the sea, a city glowing with white, unearthly
radiance, a city peopled by unhuman creatures, but reared into being
by more than human power!
"We stared down upon it, in indescribable awe and wonder, and then
Evans, the commander, uttered a sudden exclamation. A group of the
strange slug-creatures had collected in the street just below us,
gazing up through the waters toward us with their strange, dark eyes,
and now we saw that across the city toward us was striding an erect,
gigantic shape. It came from the direction of the great pit and tower,
where there could be glimpsed others like it—an erect, vast shape of
metal, striding toward us on two mighty limbs or columns which must
have measured a thousand feet in height, and which supported at
their top a small disk-platform on which were grouped two or three of
the slug-creatures, operating their vast mechanism. From below this
platform, too, there projected a great jointed limb, or arm, of almost
the same length as the two great legs, and as the vast thing strode
toward us over the city of globes this mighty arm was reaching out
toward our craft.
"I uttered a shout, and heard a hoarse order from Evans shouted
through the speaking-tube, and a moment later the submarine shot
upward with all the power of its motors. But as it did so there came a
jarring shock and clash of metal, and then our craft was pulled
downward, its propellers spinning in vain. The great upraised arm of
the giant striding machine had gripped us and held us as a child
might hold a toy.
"Now, with that great arm circling the submarine and holding it tightly,
the vast mechanism began to stride back across the city, and a
moment later had halted, and was lowering our craft to the city's floor.
Below us, we saw, was a group of three of the globe-buildings set
apart from the others in a small clearing, and before one of these the
arm that held our craft placed it, still holding it tightly. We saw the
great door of the globe-building, fifty feet across and twice that in
height, opening by sliding down into the metal pavement below. Ten
feet inside was another similar door which was opening likewise, both
great doors being quite transparent, though apparently of immense
strength. In a moment our craft had been pushed inside, into the
bare, white-lit interior of the great metal globe, and then both great
doors rolled back up and closed tightly. Our submarine, with all in it,
was prisoned in the waters inside.
"That great arm circled the submarine and held it tightly."
"The next moment, though, there came the throb of great pumps, and
swiftly the waters inside the globe began to sink, while a strange
hissing began. A glance at the dials explained it, for as the waters
sank they were being replaced by air, at a pressure the same as at
sea-level. In a moment more the waters had disappeared entirely,
and cautiously we opened the conning-tower doors and stepped out.
The air, we found, was quite pure and breathable, though with a
strange odor of chemicals, and had it not been for the vast white-lit
city of globes lying beneath the waters outside our transparent doors,
one might have thought himself in some room on earth's surface.
"I knew, though, as the submarine's startled occupants stepped out
into our strange prison, how far we were from earth's surface, how
unfathomably far from the life of humanity in this city of the sea's dark
depths, this white-lit town of the trackless ocean's floor. For I knew
now how far from humanity were these strange and fearful slug-
creatures who were of more than human intelligence, but with no
human point of view, who could capture men and put them in this
prison of air at the sea's bottom as we of earth would capture some
creatures of the sea and imprison them in a prison of water, or
aquarium, on earth!
"We were not long left undisturbed in our strange prison. Within a few
minutes we saw, approaching our building from outside along the
smooth-paved street, a group of the slug-creatures who carried with
them what seemed strange suits of flexible metal, with transparent
eye-holes. Three of them donned these, fastening them carefully, and
then the outer door of our prison rolled down and the three moved or
crawled into the vestibule, or space between the doors, which was
filled with water, of course. A moment later came the throbbing of
pumps again, the vestibule emptied of water and filled with air, and as
the inner door rolled down in turn the three crawled into our prison.
Their armored suits, we saw, were filled with water to enable them to
venture into the unfamiliar element of air, just as a human diver in an
air-filled suit will venture into water.
"A moment we humans stared at these strange figures, in sickened
horror, while those outside watched us carefully through the clear
door, ready to open it and send the destroying floods in upon us at
any wrong move on our part. Then one of the three, with a long,
slender rod in his grasp, moved to the metal wall of our prison and
drew a sketch, or diagram, of sea and land, with slug-like creatures at
the sea's bottom and erect, manlike ones upon the land. He pointed
from the former to himself, and from the latter to us, and I stepped
forward and repeated his gesture to show our understanding.
"With this beginning he worked on, with other sketches and diagrams,
establishing a slender line of communication between us, while those
of our party watched in fascinated horror. At the end of an hour or
more of this the things left us, through the vestibule-chamber, leaving
us all in a strange state of wonder and fear. There was but little
conversation on the part of any of us, and though we examined our
prison carefully there seemed no chance whatever for escape; so the
hours that followed passed in a semi-lassitude and silence, broken
only by a sketchy meal from our own stores, after which most of our
party resigned themselves to sleep. The air, we noted, remained quite
pure, and was apparently made artificially by these creatures in some
way, and pumped to us from outside.
"The next day passed in the same way, and the next, and the next,
strange nightless and dawnless days, eternally lit by the perpetual
white radiance, which followed one another like the time-periods of a
dream. In those days, however, the creatures who were our captors
persisted in endeavoring to establish communication with us, for their
own purposes, and gradually Lewis and I attained to an exchange of
ideas with them. Their purpose, we found, was to question us
concerning the world above, particularly concerning our nations and
cities and their relation to the sea. We did not understand the purpose
of those questions, then, but bit by bit during that exchange of ideas
we came to learn something of their own history and plans, and
began at last to understand what terrible peril was hanging above our
world.
"These creatures, as we had guessed, were native to the sea as man
is native to the land, developed from the lower forms of sea-creatures
in the remote past just as man developed from the lower land ones.
Life began in the sea, as you know, and these slug-beings had
developed into intelligence and power while man was still a half-ape
roaming the barren plains. They had built their great globe-cities at
the sea's bottom, and for their greater convenience had lit them with
the light-producing mechanisms on the globes, which set up a
permanent excitation or vibration of the ether, of a frequency that
formed perpetual light-vibrations. In their hidden depths they reigned,
lords of the sea.
"But their domains were steadily diminishing. You know that since the
dawn of time earth's seas have dwindled steadily, following the laws
of molecular motion, that slowly those seas have retreated and
dwindled, as on every planet they do, as on Mars they did eons ago.
And since the slug-people could live only in the terrific pressures of
the great depths their own realms were swiftly shrinking. They must
either form some plan to halt the dwindling of the seas, or face certain
extinction.
"They finally, after long discussion, adopted a stupendous plan, which
was none other than to produce artificially such vast quantities of
water as would replenish the dwindled seas, would cover all earth
miles deep with them and give all earth as the slug-people's domain.
They knew, in their science, how to form atoms of any element out of
the primal ether itself by raising it to the desired frequency of
vibration. Just as they had produced light from the ether they could
produce matter, which is but a vibration of the universal ether.
Suppose, then, that they set up vast generators to form immense
quantities of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and suppose those
tremendous quantities of hydrogen and oxygen were mixed together,
with a small proportion of certain chemicals added. The result would
be that from the generators immense quantities of sea water would
be shot forth to add to the sea's bulk, to cause it to rise until it
covered the highest peaks. They needed only to make generators of
sufficient size and number, and at this they set to work.
"They set to work, and for the sake of convenience they built their
vast generators under their own cities, which were located in all the
great deeps of the sea over earth, in the Atlantic and Pacific and
Indian oceans, vast cities with countless hordes of the slug-creatures.
Under each of their cities lay one of the titanic generators, with a vast
pit-opening at the city's center for the waters that would be formed to
issue forth from beneath. It was a work of centuries, of ages, this
building of the great generators, one beside which the building of the
pyramids was but the task of an hour. Man rose to power on earth
above them, never suspecting their presence, even, and still in the
depths the slug-creatures worked on at their great task, that was to
give them all the world.
"At last the great generators, under the cities of the slug-people in all
the deeps of the sea, approached completion. It was necessary to
provide a single control for all of them, so that all could be turned on
at the same moment, since otherwise the inequality of currents might
produce too great disturbances of the sea. This control, therefore,
was placed in a small room at the top of a great spire at the center of
one of their cities in the deeps of the mid-Atlantic, the city which we
had discovered and where we were prisoned. And now, as we
learned, the great work was almost finished, and soon the generators
which had taken ages to build would be put into action. Around the
spire which held the control of all the generators there watched
always their giant striding-machines, since this little room at the
spire's tip held all the energies of all their generators on earth
centered inside it, and should it be damaged or wrecked the
generators themselves would run wild, resulting in titanic etheric
explosions which would inevitably destroy not only all the generators
themselves but also the great cities built upon them, and the
numberless slug-people of those cities.
"In sick despair we watched the days passing, cooped in our little
prison, while the plans of the slug-people came to their climax. Far
above us, we knew, were sunlight, and fresh breezes, and ships
going to and fro upon the waters, but around us were only the
oppressing waters and the white radiance and the city of globes and
its unhuman people. And at last the age-old plans of those people
were finished, and the great generators were turned on. We saw
them flocking through the streets toward the great spire and the vast
pit, saw a gleam of sudden green radiance from the control room at
the spire's top, in the distance; and then there was a great quivering
of the ground and the waters about us, and up from the pit there shot
with immense force and speed a vast current of waters, a
tremendous solid stream two miles wide and of terrific speed, formed
we knew by the combining elements in the vast generator beneath
the city, turning each moment millions of tons of water into the seas
above us. And we knew, too, that at that moment in all the other cities
of the slug-people across all the deeps of the sea, other and similar
currents were being shot forth by the titanic generators, adding each
moment incalculable amounts to the bulk of the seas.
"Through all that day we watched the great current shooting
ceaselessly up through the calmer waters about it, and through the
next, and knew that on earth the waters must already be rising inch
by inch, and that they would creep up, inch by inch and foot by foot,
until they had covered all earth's fields and forests and cities and
highest peaks, until earth itself was covered miles deep with this sea
of hell, and at its bottom the slug-people reigned triumphant. Then, at
last, the agony of our despair broke forth, and we seized at once
upon a chance for escape which presented itself.
"It was in a suggestion made by Evans, the submarine's commander,
that we saw our chance. His plan seemed suicidal, almost, but it was
still a chance, so we ignored the risks. Waiting for some hours until
the street outside our prison had emptied somewhat of the passing
slug-people, we took from the submarine's equipment a long, slender
drill of steel, and with this, held and guided by two seamen, set to
work on the metal wall of our prison. At first the metal seemed too
hard for the drill to affect, but gradually it bit into it, deeper and
deeper. Inch by inch it crept on into the thick metal wall, while we
watched anxiously. The hours were passing swiftly, and in the
distance we could see the mighty current from the pit still roaring
upward, but at last, when it seemed that the wall was too thick for us,
the drill broke through.
"Before we could withdraw it, it had been knocked inward toward us
with terrific force by the pressure of the waters outside, and through
the two-inch hole it left came shooting inward a solid stream of water
of terrific force. In a moment that jet had filled the great room to a
depth of a foot, and hastily we splashed toward our submarine,
clambering up and inside it and shutting tightly the heavy doors. From
the port-holes we could see the waters in the room swiftly rising, until
within a few more minutes they had risen sufficiently to float the
submarine, which had been lying on the bare metal floor of the great
room.
"Instantly Evans gave an order, and at once the craft's motors began
to hum and its reversed propellers to thrash the waters, backing us
against the wall opposite the great doors. There we paused a
moment, and then another order sent the boat leaping across the
great room through the waters like a living thing, toward the inner of
the two great doors, which could be opened only from the outside.
With a great ramming shock the craft's prow struck the door; for this
was our plan, to batter down the two doors if possible and make our
escape. The door, we saw, had been shaken by the blow, its thick,
transparent metal deeply dented, but it still hung fast; so again the
submarine retreated to the opposite wall and again leapt forward to
crash against the barrier.
"At the second blow there was a clash of metal against the sides of
our craft and we saw that the great door had crumpled beneath the
two blows. Only the outer door barred our escape, now, and excitedly
we watched as the submarine reversed once more and leapt forward
against that last barrier. We struck it with a great jar that again
knocked us all from our feet but did not dislodge the door, and now
there came a sudden exclamation from Evans as he saw, through the
port-hole, a group of the slug-creatures who had stopped outside and
were peering in toward us. As our craft leaped forward in another
dash against the thick metal we saw them hastening down the street,
and a moment later saw striding over the city from the distant spire
three of the great machines that guarded that spire, hastening across
the city in gigantic strides toward us!
"In spite of our second blow the outer door still hung fast, and swiftly
the hastening machines were nearing us. By now the submarine's
motors were humming at their highest power, and as Evans hoarsely
shouted the order, the craft backed against the wall, hesitated for a
moment, and then leapt forward through the waters toward the outer
door for a third time, with all the force of its whirling propellers. As we
shot forward I saw, not a thousand feet away, the great machines that
were bending down toward our prison, and then there came a great
crash and jar, the great metal door was crumpled aside like one of
cardboard, and our submarine shot out into the open waters. Swiftly
toward us reached the great arm of the foremost giant machine, and
for a moment, as we slanted sharply upward, we felt the end of that
arm graze against the side of our craft. Then we had torn past it and
were shooting up through the waters toward the surface at a steep
angle, up until the city of globes and the white radiance that bathed it
were lost from view beneath us.
"Up, up, up—until at last our craft shot bodily out of the waters into
the sunlight and clean air. Panting and half senseless we ripped the
doors open, breathed deep of the salt breezes. The waters on which
the submarine floated were running in great seas, and from a hasty
consultation of our instruments we saw that already the sea's level
had risen several feet, and knew, too, as no others did, what was
causing that rise and bringing doom upon the earth. So we set our
course back toward England and raced homeward through the rising
waters to bring our warning to the world, for in the general panic our
radio calls received no answer. East and southeast we held, and at
last were sweeping into the harbor of London, where, after a frantic
hour, Evans, Lewis and I were able to convince the naval authorities
of the truth of our story, were able to convince them that the only
remaining chance to prevent the destruction of all our world is to
descend into the depths in force and destroy or attempt to destroy the
great generator which we saw in action there in the deeps of the
Atlantic, and after it the others.
"This was but a few hours ago, Stevens, and in those hours and while
I have talked here with you the submarines of all the British fleet, the
new-type submersibles which alone can descend into those terrific
depths, have been gathered in the flooded Thames and soon will sail,
with the submarines of all other countries that can be gathered, to
make one last attempt to save our world. I had an hour or more, I
knew, so while Lewis hastened away in search of his family. I, who
have none, came here in the hope of finding you, Stevens, knowing
that you would be with us if you could. And so now you know what
terror it is that is flooding our world, that is rising toward the death of
all humanity, and toward which, at the bottom of the Atlantic, we sail
within the hour, for one final desperate attempt to halt this rising
doom."
Clinton rose to his feet with these words, gazed silently out over the
red-lit city, over the rising floods that rushed through its streets and
sent the fear-crazed fugitives outside shouting down those streets in
blind horror. Stevens, too, arose, gazed with him, and then with a
common impulse and with no spoken word they had turned toward
the door, toward the street. Half an hour later they had won their way
across the dark, flooded wilderness that was London toward the rank
on rank of long, grim steel hulls that swung by the shores of the
swollen Thames, and a few minutes later they stood in the narrow
control room of one of those hulls as they swung in formation out to
the open sea, more than a hundred strong.
Out, out, they moved, into the darkness of the surging channel, and
then southward around the foreland, where there fell in at the side of
their formation a similar formation of an equal number of craft, the
combined Atlantic and Mediterranean submarine fleets of France,
Germany and Italy. Still the combined fleets moved on, toward the
west, through the surging, tremendous waves, in steady, unchanging
formation. Onward through the hours of the night they moved, and on
into the day, still westward, and through the night again until at last, at
dawn, there could be seen on the waters far ahead a multitude of
long black spots, long steel hulls like their own, the great American
submarine fleet racing eastward in answer to the call for help. The
two fleets met, coalesced, and then, in one great triangular formation,
more than three hundred strong, turned and headed north. The
morning waned, and the afternoon, and sunset came, but still those
gathered scores of long grim craft forged north and north, toward the
Nelsen Deeps and what lay at their bottom, toward the last great
battle of humanity to save its drowning world.
5
Standing in the submarine's narrow control room, Clinton gazed
intently at the dials before him, then out of the port-holes in the wall.
"We're there, Stevens," he said, quietly, gesturing toward the little
windows through which the great fleet behind could be seen, each of
its scores of craft resting motionless on the surface. And now the
submarine's commander, Evans, who had been lost and prisoned
with Clinton, came toward them.
"Our craft will descend first," he told them, "the others following in
close formation. Our plan is to descend to an elevation of a few
thousand feet above the city and attempt to cripple or destroy the
generator beneath it with our torpedoes and bomb-charges."
While he spoke he had twisted around the signal-lever on the dial
before him, and a moment later, in answer to his signal, the boat's
electric motors again took up their powerful hum. At the same time it
began to move forward through the waters, slanting downward.
Stevens had a last glimpse through the port-holes of the sea and sky
outside, warmly lit by the sun that blazed above, and then the long
green waves were washing up over the glass and over the
submarine's conning-tower as it slanted downward, in a great spiral.
And soon the green waters outside, alive with shoals of silvery fish,
were darkening, changing, as the needle on the bathometer dial crept
slowly around.
He looked up suddenly as he glimpsed through the port-holes a dark
shape passing above, and then saw that it was but one of the
submarines of the fleet above, descending after them and following
them, score upon score of long, dark, fishlike hulls, that circled and
dipped and sank after them, down toward the fate of a world. Surely
in all the record of battles had men never gone toward battle like this,
with no shouts or cheers or flying flags or defiant shots, but only the
dark, grim shapes that sank gently down and down into the peaceful,
darkening depths of the sea.
Down, down, down—a thousand feet the dial registered, and the
waters about the submarine had become dark blue, all but lightless,
and darkening still more as they steadily dropped lower. There were
no lights turned on, nothing to betray their presence, and into a still
deeper darkness the great fleet sank, while Clinton and Evans and
the seamen in the little room stared from the dials to the dark port-
holes with strange, set faces. Great currents had begin to rock and
sway the submarine as it dropped on, currents from the mighty
generator below, Stevens knew, but still they held to their downward
progress until the bathometric dial showed a depth of a mile—a mile
and a half—two miles——
Abruptly Clinton, at the port-holes, made a sudden gesture, and
pointed downward. Stevens gazed intently down into the blackness
that seemed to press against the glass, and then he uttered a low
exclamation. For he could make out, far below, a ghostly white
radiance that filtered faintly up toward them through the filmy depths.
Stronger and stronger it was growing as they sank down toward it,
and he saw Evans turn, give swift orders through the speaking-tube
by his side, and heard the clang and clash of metal somewhere in the
submarine as its great torpedo and bomb tubes were made ready. In
an instant, it seemed, while they dropped downward still, the stillness
of the submarine had been replaced by swift activity. And then,
cutting abruptly across the sounds of that activity, came a sharp cry
from Clinton.
"Those globes!" he cried. "They are coming up! Look!"
But Stevens, too, had seen. Outlined dark against the growing white
light beneath them he had glimpsed a dark, round object that was
moving steadily and swiftly up toward them from beneath, that moved
up with ever-increasing speed like the reversal of some object falling
downward. Swiftly it came, and now he could see that it was a black
metal globe perhaps a yard in diameter. He felt the submarine swerve
sharply as Evans abruptly spun its wheel, glimpsed the uprushing
globe grazing past its side, and then the thing had passed above
them, and had struck full on the bottom of a submarine just above.
There was a flash of intense purple light, flaring out through the
waters in blinding intensity, and then the submarine rocked and spun
like a leaf in a gale, while the great flash and the craft above which it
had enveloped vanished together.
"Bombs!" shouted Clinton. "Bombs of some kind that they release
from beneath, to rise and strike us—and look, more——"
Even as he spoke there was rushing up toward them from beneath an
immense mass of the round black globes, seeming in that moment to
fill the waters about them.
Stevens remembered the next few moments only as a timeless
period of flashing action. He felt the submarine dive steeply
downward under the hand of its commander, saw through the glass
scores of the deadly globes flashing up past them, and then the
submarine again was rocked by titanic convulsions of the waters
about it as craft after craft of the fleet above them vanished in blinding
flashes of the purple light. In those few minutes, he knew, scores of
the submarines that followed them had fallen victim to the deadly
spheres.
But now the great fleet, diving sharply amid that deadly uprush of
globes, was within a few thousand feet of the sea's floor, was slanting
down through the white radiance toward the city below, which
Stevens saw for the first time. A moment, as the fleet seemed to
pause above the city, he saw it all plain—the multitudes of ranked
great globular structures, stretching away as far as the eye could see,
the dark, slug-like beings that hastened through their streets and
squares, the vast pit at the city's center from which arose the mighty,
half-glimpsed current of waters, and the towering spire near that pit's
edge, the tiny bulbular room at its top a point of green radiance,
around which were grouped scores of the vast, thousand-foot
striding-machines. Then that one moment of pause was over and the
whole great fleet was swooping down upon the city below, releasing a
shower of great torpedoes and bombs as it did so.
The next moment there came a hundred flashes of fire beneath them
as the torpedoes and depth-charges struck, and then it seemed as
though in a score of places beneath them the city was crumbling,
disintegrating, beneath the force of the great explosions. The
submarine was rocking and swaying perilously from the effect of
those explosions, only the super-resistant hulls of the new-type craft
enabling them to endure the shock, but even while Stevens heard the
men near him shouting hoarsely he was aware that the massed boats
were diving again, and again the thunderous detonations below came
dully to their ears through the waters about them.
But now he heard a sudden cry of alarm, taken up and repeated by
all in the control room. From far away, all around the great city, there
were hastening toward the attacking submarines scores of the giant
striding-machines, their vast steps whirling them across the city with
inconceivable swiftness, the great arm of each outstretched toward
the submarines. An order was barked, and the craft's propellers spun
swiftly as it headed upward to avoid those reaching, menacing arms,
while the whole great fleet headed up also with the same purpose.
The next moment, however, a spark of more brilliant white light broke
into being in the city below them—a great, erect cylinder, they saw,
that was suddenly shining with a dazzling radiance that darkened the
white luminosity of the waters about it. And as it broke into being the
submarine below seemed suddenly to waver, to halt, and then to be
pulled slowly, steadily downward by great unseen hands, toward that
shining cylinder.
Stevens heard the motors throbbing in his own craft, its spinning
propellers only serving to hold it in the same position, and heard a
shout from Evans.
"That cylinder!" he cried. "It's a great magnet of some kind—it's
pulling our ships downward!"
For now by dozens, by scores, by hundreds, the fleet's massed ships
were being pulled downward, their screws thrashing the waters in
vain, pulled down toward that mighty, dazzling beacon of light. The
next moment the great striding-machines had reached them, were
grasping them, crushing them, whirling them about like toys and
hurling them far away to break and smash upon the globes below,
spilling forth men and air-bubbles and great clouds of oil. Ever
downward, downward, the mighty magnet of light pulled the helpless
craft, while Stevens' own craft, highest of them all, could only resist
that terrific pull by all the power of its humming motors. And among
the helpless craft below he could see the great machines of the slug-
people stalking about in terrific destruction, crushing and smashing
the defenseless boats as they sought vainly to escape while Stevens'
own craft sought frenziedly to win out of the remorseless grip that
held it.
But now, below, the doomed submarines seemed suddenly to cease
their efforts to escape from the great magnet's grip, and abruptly
turned, paused, and then hurtled down with all their own force and
that of the attracting magnet toward the giant machines below them
whose great arms were destroying them. Stevens cried out hoarsely
as he saw torpedo and bomb flash down and send a half-dozen of
the great machines reeling and crashing down upon the city in
flashes of bursting fire. At the same moment he was aware that their
own craft was winning slowly out of the giant grip of the magnet, inch
by inch, foot by foot, creeping upward and outward from that grip,
while below the last scores of the attacking submarines were meeting
their doom, crushed by the arms of the giant machines and
annihilated by the purple-flaring bombs that rushed up toward them
from the city below.
And now the great machines were striding toward his own craft, the
last remaining one except for a few far across the city that were
battling their way upward against others of the machines. Slowly,
slowly, the submarine crept upward, while the mighty shapes whirled
across the streets and globes of the city toward it. They were below it,
now, were reaching up with gigantic arms, and Stevens stared down
upon those upward-reaching arms in a strange apathy of despair. The
battle was over, he knew, humanity's battle, lost now forever, its last
chance flickered out. Up came the whirling arms, up, while still the
submarine crept higher, and then one of them had struck it a great,
glancing blow, in reaching for it, had knocked all in it to the floor,
stunning Evans and his seaman and Stevens himself against the
metal walls, and knocking, too, the submarine out of the last limits of
the magnet's giant grip.
Its propellers whirling with sudden power, it shot out of that unseen
hold, over the city, and Stevens raised his head, stunned and
bleeding, to see Clinton standing at the wheel, to hear his wild shout
as he sent the submarine racing above the city toward the great pit
and the uprushing current at its center, toward the towering spire at
that pit's rim, and the round, green-lit little control room at its top.
Straight toward that ball-like room at the great spire's tip flashed the
racing submarine, and Stevens glimpsed the mighty striding-
machines, far across the city, abandoning the battle with the
remaining few submarines, which shot sharply upward, to whirl after
their own; saw rushing toward them from around the spire others of
the giant machines, their vast arms upraised to grasp and crush the
hurtling craft. But before they could grasp it, before their great arms
could do ought more than graze along its sides, Clinton had sent the
submarine flashing past them with a hoarse cry and had crashed it
straight into the little room at the mighty tower's tip.
Through the metal walls of that room the hurtling submarine crashed
as though through walls of paper, speeding still straight up and
outward with the force of its tremendous impetus. To the half-
conscious Stevens, crouched there. It seemed that for a single
moment the whole world held its breath, and then he saw a fountain
of brilliant green fire burst out and upward from the little control room
at the great spire's top, felt a mighty, thundering detonation shake the
waters about him, and then half glimpsed below him the sea's bottom
and the great city upon it heaving, rumpling, breaking and crashing,
as that city broke up and was annihilated by a tremendous uprush of
dazzling fires from beneath it—broke up and was annihilated, as he
knew, by the explosion of the mighty generator beneath it, whose
titanic, pent-up energies the wrecking of the little control room had
released—broke up and was annihilated, Stevens knew, as all the
cities of the slug-people had been in that moment, when the mighty
generators beneath each of those cities exploded likewise, the
prisoned energies of all of them released by the wrecking of the little
room from which all had been controlled. In all the far-flung deeps of
earth's seas the cities of the slug-people and all their hideous hordes
had met annihilation in that tremendous moment, he knew. The earth
shuddered and swayed beneath those simultaneous, titanic
cataclysms; the sea's whole floor rolled and shook; and then, as the
submarine was flung wildly upward by the terrific convulsions of the
waters, the vast fiery uprush of destruction beneath faded from his
eyes.
Then Stevens felt his senses failing him, sank backward and was but
dimly conscious of the waters outside the submarine roaring wildly as
it shot upward with terrific speed. For a time that seemed endless to
his darkened mind that roaring continued, and then abruptly came
silence, and a great shock and splash. Then he felt hands upon him,
and hoarse voices shouting in his ears, heard the doors above
clanging open, admitting a flood of sunlight and clean fresh air upon
him, and then he knew no more.

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Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American

Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath James

Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe Michiko Tsushima

Translating Samuel Beckett around the World 1st Edition

Major Problems in American History, Volume I

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 1st ed. Edition

Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and

Major Problems in American History - Volume I: To 1877

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies

More information about this series at

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

Cover image by Jo Morton

1 Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right country…’ 1

2 Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett and the American

3 Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme

4 ‘…between zero and one’: Opposing Tendencies

5 Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’171

6 Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Beckett’s Post-­Millennial

7 A ‘Postmodern Icon’?243

Fig. 2.1 Back cover of Evergreen Review, No. 5 (Summer 1958).

Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

theatre, Bianchini valuably comments on the often-irreconcilable tensions

S.E. Gontarski, ‘Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America,’ in A

Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by S.E. Gontarski, (Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester,

Such an auspicious account would not be borne out in the immediate

for ‘seventy thousand intellectuals.’19 Critical feedback remained largely

Quoted in Natka Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America, p. 35.

draw from both mainstream and alternative modes of legitimation: some-

revenant Irishness, through which Beckett’s connection to nationhood is

‘Unlikely, if not odd’: Beckett, Rosset

At the outset, it is vital to emphasize Beckett’s practical connections

Waiting for Godot would go on to become highly influential Grove publi-

world,’48 presenting a significant gateway into the subject of Beckett’s

the application of plastic surgery in excruciating and grotesque detail,

Notes on Methodology: Postmodernism,

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, (Methuen: New York, 1987), p. 3.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Verso:

London, 1991), p. 305.

Beginning in 1957 with Beckett’s first appearance in the Evergreen

of his generation, Pynchon would point to Evergreen as an eye-opening

poetic murmurs of Texts for Nothing, to the tender, heart-breaking

Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett

It is impossible to dissociate Beckett’s American legacy from the cultural

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

commemorate the English translation of Waiting for Godot (released by

radicalism, avant-garde aesthetics and explicit and deviant sexuality.’10

of The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett, advertised in No. 80 (July, 1970)

to the distance between Beckett’s modernism and the countercultural

William Burroughs was a writer he [Beckett] particularly didn’t understand.

Rosset’s amusing anecdote connects Beckett’s American importance to

Indeed, Beckett and Burroughs become central figures of what

convictions were significantly aroused by his compatriot-in-exile Joyce.

commitment to expanding the distribution of and access to what were

1957–1963: The Invention of ‘Vulgar Modernism’

Mississippi jazz—the latter disrupting, Rosset avers, Evergreen’s straight-

story’ and ‘a group of unusual poems.’ As we will see, Beckett’s comedy

You might also like

1 Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right country…’ 1

2 Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett and the American

3 Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme

4 ‘…between zero and one’: Opposing Tendencies

5 Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’171

6 Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Beckett’s Post-Millennial

7 A ‘Postmodern Icon’?243