• Foreword by Ruby Cohn
Part I: Essays at Esthetics •
Dante...
Bruno.
Vico..
Joyce –
essay on Finnegans Wake • Le Concentrisme –
an account of an imaginary poet and the movement supposedly founded by him (French) • Excerpts from
Dream of Fair to Middling Women • German Letter of 1937 (German) • Les Deux Besoins (French)
Part II: Words about Writers • Other Writers •
Mörike on
Mozart • Feuillerat on
Proust • Leishmann's
Rilke translation •
Thomas MacGreevy • Recent
Irish poetry •
Ezra Pound •
Papini on Dante •
Seán O'Casey • Censorship in the Street •
Jack B. Yeats •
Denis Devlin • McGreevy on Jack B. Yeats • Self • The Possessed • On
Murphy (to McGreevy) • On Murphy (to Reavy) • On Works to 1951 • On
Endgame • On
Play • On Murphy (to Sighle Kennedy) • Program note for Endgame
Part III: Words about Painters •
Geer van Velde • La Peinture des van Velde (French) • Peintres de l'Empêchement (French) •
Three Dialogues •
Henri Hayden Homme-Peintre (French) • Hommage à Jack B. Yeats (French) • Henri Heyden •
Bram van Velde • Pour
Avigdor Arikha (French)
Part IV: Human Wishes A One-Act fragment from an early historical play. The play dramatized some episodes from the life of
Samuel Johnson and takes its title from his long poem
The Vanity of Human Wishes. The episodes taken dramatize Johnson's relationship with
Hester Thrale, and as such, draw from her
Anecdotes and
Diaries rather than the traditionally more popular
Life of Samuel Johnson of
James Boswell. The play was abandoned after the completion of the First Act. The only known extant fragment was given by Beckett to
Ruby Cohn. Beckett left it in her Paris Hotel room shortly before the completion of her book of Beckett criticism,
Just Play, the first to outline Beckett's dramatic
juvenilia. The fragment was first printed as an appendix to that volume. The fragment was slightly annotated for the Disjecta collection, noting that Beckett produced a "fair copy" of the notebook material. The fragment, however, is only one of the "three full notebooks" that Beckett used while writing the play. Beckett would reuse some of the dramatic effects, however. Critic
Harold Bloom writes in his essay on Beckett in
The Western Canon that the fragment, and in particular the characters' reactions to Levett's entrance, offer the first glimpses of Beckett's much later masterpieces
Endgame and
Waiting for Godot. ==Notes==