Recently I was at the Samuel Beckett Centre trying to work out whether Samuel Beckett had anything to do with psychogeography in 1950s Rive Gauche Paris. I really like ‘Fingal’ from his earliest throng of short stories More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) (my copy is Grove Press fyi). It’s less formally radical than later collections like Fizzles(1976), but radical nonetheless. All of More Pricks Than Kicks focuses on “Belacqua”, a young fellow named after minor lazy-but-rewarded character woo in Dante’s Divina Comedia (1321). After an initial tale detailing Belacqua’s precisest requirements for constructing a perfect lobster-and-gorgonzola-sandwich, ‘Fingal’ pictures he with “Winnie” who’s “pretty, hot and witty, in that order” (can you believe Samuel Beckett was saying “hot” in this way in the 1930s?!) going outside Dublin on a countryside adventure. Past ruins, burrows, furze, brambles, and slopes to the top of a hill overlooking the county of Fingal, Belacqua feels like a “sad animal” but apparently Winnie’s high-spirited: “‘The Dublin mountains’ she said ‘don’t they look lovely, so dreamy’”. Aah. They talk about “Milan (to rime with villain)” ha ha while they’re up there, “travelled spinster” Belacqua shaming Winnie for her geographical short-comings. “Things were beginning to blow up nasty” between them but then Belacqua and Winnie kiss and “their moods were in accordance” and “things were somehow very pleasant all of a sudden” as they gaze on Portraine Lunatic Aslyum (which Belacqua had thought was a bread factory). They go there and meet Dr. Sholto, with whom Winnie is somehow acquainted, for a drink and chat avoiding a farmer Belacqua worries wants to attack them, then a bike is stolen and then there’s an escape to a pub. It is an Evocative Romp.
From More Pricks Than Kicks, first published by Chatto & Windus 1934, various editions thereafter
A Personal Anthology 