A Beckett Canon

by Ruby Cohn

Samuel Beckett is unique in literature. Born and educated in Ireland, he lived most of his life in Paris. His literary output was rendered in either English or French, and he often translated one to the other, but there is disagreement about the contents of his bilingual corpus. A Beckett Canon by renowned theater scholar Ruby Cohn offers an invaluable guide to the entire corpus, commenting on Beckett's work in its original language.
Beginning in 1929 with Beckett's earliest work, the book examines the variety of genres in which he poems, short stories, novels, plays, radio pieces, teleplays, reviews, and criticism. Cohn grapples with the difficulties in Beckett's work, including the opaque erudition of the early English verse and fiction, and the searching depths and syntactical ellipsis of the late works.
Specialist and nonspecialist readers will find A Beckett Canon valuable for its remarkable inclusiveness. Cohn has examined the holdings of all of the major Beckett depositories, and is thus able to highlight neglected manuscripts and correct occasional errors in their listings. Intended as a resource to accompany the reading of Beckett's writing--in English or French, published or unpublished, in part or as a whole--the book offers context, information, and interpretation of the work of one of the last century's most important writers.
Ruby Cohn is Professor Emerita of Comparative Drama, University of California, Davis. She is author or editor of many books, including Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama; Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama; From Desire to Godot ; and Just Beckett's Theater.

432 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2001

Reviews

[Mandel]

For the last ten months or so, as I've read through Beckett's entire body of work chronologically, Ruby Cohn's definitive guide to everything he wrote has been my constant companion. The conceit of this volume is quite simple. Cohn lists all of Beckett's works in the order in which he completed them - absolutely every individual novel, novella, poem, short prose piece, play, essay, etc. For each, she gives an account of the circumstances of its composition, lists venues and/or editions in which it has been published, and a offers a brief interpretive essay.

Cohn was and remains one of the most important Beckett scholars. A close personal friend and confidante of his, she had unique access to his own thoughts about his works, as well as to his papers. For most people, I'd imagine this will serve as a good reference work. If you ever encounter anything written by Beckett, you can look it up in here and get a basic rundown on it. The only people who are likely to read it from cover to cover, though, are completists like me.

Here are a few things that might be of use to folks who decide to make use of this incredibly handy volume. First of all, bear in mind that it was published in 2001. So, although Cohn's lists of publication venues were no doubt current for their time, they are now outdated in certain (relatively minor) respects. For example, a number of the poems Cohn lists as unpublished have subsequently (thankfully) been published in the 2014 edition of Lawlor and Pillings' The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett.

Lastly, there is at least one significant error in the book - one which caused me no little frustration at the very beginning of my reading project. Cohn writes that Beckett's very first publication - a one-page piece of juvenilia entitled Che Sciagura, which he composed for Trinity College Dublin's undergrad journal T.C.D.: A College Miscellany - has been reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. This is wrong - and quite mysteriously so, since Cohn herself edited Disjecta. More irritatingly, Che Sciagura hasn't to my knowledge been reprinted anywhere. So, to track it down, you'll probably need the services of a particular intrepid interlibrary loan staff person: not too many universities carry copies of century-old undergraduate magazines...