WORSENING IN WORSTWARD HO: A Brief Look at the Genesis of the Text

Abstract

MS 2602 in the Beckett Archives at Reading University Library contains the manuscript and typescript drafts for Beckett's last major prose work, Worstward Ho. It consists of 21 roughly A5-sized sheets of manuscript torn out of a spiral-bound notebook, and two sets of A4 sized typescript, ten and nine sheets respectively. The first manuscript draft (to be referred to as MSI), dated 9 and 12 August 1981, covers the first four pages. It is then abandoned, in favour of the holograph manuscript which follows it (to be referred to as MS2), dated 20 September 1981 to 17 March 1982. The typescripts (to be referred to as TS1 and TS2) bear no date; as internal evidence (typed and handwritten corrections) bears out, they are both also Beckett's own. Collation of this material promises to furnish some interesting insights into Beckett's compositional method in general. However, our primary purpose for turning to this rich source is to add a chapter to the book-length study of Worstward Ho that we are currently preparing. Worstward Ho is no doubt one of the most hermetic of Beckett's texts, and our approach is to pursue as many different ways into the text as promise to yield a significant contribution to our understanding of it, the study of the MS and TS drafts being one of them. Though we are still in the process of transcription,1 it is possible at this stage to present some preliminary findings, deriving from a comparison between the abandoned first draft (the first four pages of manuscript, referred to as MSI) and the final published text. In particular, it appears possible to confirm some of the expectations/hypotheses deriving from our study of Worstward Ho so far. In the following we shall look at two of these.