SAMUEL BECKETT HITS THE BOTTLE

Beckett’s work constantly draws attention – both on a textual and on an existential level – to all the things we cancel, annul, revoke, set aside, throw away. Most of the short poems he called “mirlitonnades” are written on scraps of paper or throwaway objects, such as a cigarette packet or an old envelope.

On a piece torn from the packaging for a Johnnie Walker whisky bottle, he wrote a poem in French, starting with the words “finie / ou peu s’en faut / la vie” (life finished, nearly), a variation on the opening line of his 1950s play Endgame.

Beckett kept undoing his words and wrote half a dozen versions of this poem on this one scrap of cardboard. In version six, the opening words have changed to “mots mourant” (words dying). At that moment, July 27 1977, the author seemed to have been satisfied enough to copy it into the notebook in which he wrote the fair copies of his “mirlitonnades”. But as soon as he had copied it, he changed his mind again, crossed it out, and wrote version eight, opening with the words “surviving words”:

mots survivants de la vie encore un moment tenez-nous compagnie Tanger moment / keep us company / Tangier). What is most remarkable, however, is that Beckett then copied this version one last time (minus the final word, “Tanger”), back onto the Black Label scrap, and drew a frame around it. He thus insisted on presenting the final fair copy among the flotsam and jetsam of the creative process, and he did so on a scrap of paper saved from the waste-paper basket.

Scraps: the front and back of a label on which Beckett drafted his poem