Beckett Blogging

The Chronicle: 5/12/2006: Happy Days (and Possible Endgames) for Beckett Collections:

"Mr. Knowlson would make frequent trips to Beckett's Paris apartment and return with a briefcase full of manuscripts each time. Among them was an item that Mr. Garforth describes as 'one of the Holy Grails of Beckett studies': the Whoroscope notebook, named after an early poem of Beckett's. It holds jottings from the 1930s in English, French, German, Latin, and Greek on everything from the weight of the Eiffel Tower to musical notations from The Marriage of Figaro.

'It's devastating, the amount of material there,' Mr. Garforth says. 'All sorts of weird and wonderful facts and figures. Sometimes it can be decades later before they surface in another work.'

The notebook, which measures about 4 inches by 6 inches and has a burgundy cloth cover, doesn't leave its special case very often. It accompanied Beckett on an extended German trip in 1936-37. 'It's obviously been in his pocket the six months he traveled around Germany,' the archivist says. 'It looks beautiful. It smells beautiful. You could read it forever and find something new each time you look through it.'"

The more I read of and about the man the more I appreciate where he was coming from...