How a Small Press Poetry Contest Launched Samuel Beckett’s Career

Paris, June 1930. At 3.00 in the morning, Nancy Cunard quickly writes a letter to her friend Louise Morgan, American journalist and editor at Everyman magazine:

We found a poem, a beauty, by a poet—so much so that it must be printed by itself. Irishman of 23, Ecole Normale here, that’s all I know, but am seeing him tomorrow. Richard says many of the allusions are to Descartes. I shouldn’t have known. Much in it none of us will ever know, and the whole thing so good it proves again the rest doesn’t matter.

Will you announce please that the Hours Press prize for best Time poem is awarded to Samuel Beckett.

“Richard” is Richard Aldington (1892–1962), novelist, poet, one-time husband of Hilda Doolittle (the poet ‘H.D.’), and, in Nancy Cunard’s words, a friend “ever full of ideas for me to take up.” Aldington’s most recent idea had been for a poetry competition for Cunard’s Hours Press, a way to flush out unknown talent and so find a new author for a small, one-woman printing press that had until that point only published already well-known writers such as George Moore, Robert Graves, and Arthur Symons. “Let us make it a poem on Time,” Aldington said, immediately decisive. “On any aspect of Time.” One hundred lines maximum: much better an “exquisite rhyming epigram” than something “half the length of the Iliad.” The announcement of the competition was printed quickly in red ink on small square cards which Cunard posted out to literary journals in England and France:

Nancy Cunard, Hours Press, in collaboration with Richard Aldington, offers £10 for the best poem up to 100 lines, in english or american on TIME (for or against).

Entries up to June 15, 1930.

It’s hard to think of many poems that aren’t about time—perhaps that was Aldington’s canny point—and the “for or against” clause is odd, as if time was like fox hunting or the House of Lords. When Cunard and Aldington read out loud to each other the more than 100 entries they received, it looked until the very last moment that the competition would be a disaster. This was midsummer in Normandy, in Cunard’s farmhouse Le Puits Carré (The Four-Cornered Well), in La Chapelle-Réanville.

Cunard and Aldington began reading with hope which became amusement but as the unread pile dwindled their voices transitioned into a kind of panicked despair. “God Almighty!” wrote Cunard to Morgan. “The things that come in.” The poems were bad (“one about ‘two little toadstools'”), the relative peaks merely mediocre, most of them taxingly handwritten, ranging, as Cunard nicely put it, “from doggerel to a kind of sham metaphysics,” save perhaps two or three—”and not even those were good,” according to Aldington.

But back in Paris, in the early hours of June 16, 1930—the competition deadline just passed—an unseen hand slid a folder under Cunard’s office door, the word “Whoroscope” and the name “Samuel Beckett” handwritten on the outside. Neither Cunard nor Aldington knew the name, but they realized four or five lines in that they had a poem possessed of a strange, abrasive vitality, a poem that looked you dead in the eyes even as it refused to explain.

“Mysterious, obscure in parts,” as Cunard put it, ninety-eight lines of erudite Renaissance scientific thought mixed with jolting immediacy, and the whole voiced by a cantankerous René Descartes waiting to be served an egg that he insists (such was his penchant) must have been laid between eight and ten days ago. Cunard said there needed to be notes. Beckett (only twenty-three, and thrilled by the prospect of print and £10 in cash) agreed, perhaps imagining his own sparse endnotes as a parody of the (already parodic) notes at the conclusion of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), notes which open trapdoors as they purport to lead us to the light.

“Whoroscope” was printed by Cunard on fine Vergé de Rives paper in Caslon 11-point type, with smaller notes, and was bound between dull scarlet covers: 100 signed and 200 unsigned copies were advertised for sale at 1s and 5d respectively (the signed ones go for £7,500 today). A white band wrapped around the pamphlet declared this to be both a prizewinner and Beckett’s “first separately published work,” and a copy of the poem was placed in the window of Cunard’s Hours Press shop in rue Guénégaud. Beckett was in Paris studying at the École normale supérieure—deep in Descartes—and doing research work for James Joyce. Joyce gave him tasks like listing the names of all the rivers in Europe. This was twenty years before what Cunard called Beckett’s “spectacular and merited” rise to fame.

I like the simple admiration of Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson: “It is a remarkable effort for anyone, no matter how clever, to have produced it in a matter of hours.” Remarkable, too, that Cunard so immediately perceived the unknown student’s talent, and printed the poem herself—launching what would become Beckett’s career.

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Journalist and editor Samuel Putnam was only slightly exaggerating when he said that “few persons have been more misunderstood than N.C.” That misunderstanding is partly because Cunard’s life seems to fall into contrasting, seemingly irreconcilable stages. Up until the late 1920s, her life in Paris and London looks like triviality on an aristocratic scale. “First and instant impression,” remembered publisher and novelist Kenneth Macpherson, “exciting, dotty tigress-dragonfly.”

By the late 1920s, Cunard had (as Harold Acton wrote) “dug through many layers of society to find only a crumbling foundation,” and from the early 1930s, she began to live a fearless existence of leftist political commitment, risking her life and certainly (not that she cared) her reputation in pursuing the redress of political injustice in the form of black civil rights, and in the battle against Franco and Spanish fascism.

“In the middle ages,” wrote Acton, Cunard “would have become a mystic,” and there’s absolutely something of the fourteenth-century Margery Kempe about her. Wynkyn de Worde would have printed her life, had chronology allowed. This phase was marked by Cunard’s belief in the political power of the printed word: her anthology, Negro (Wishart & Co., 1934), published entirely at Cunard’s expense (about £1,500), was an 800- page encyclopedia of the African diaspora with 385 illustrations and essays on black history, culture, and politics by, among many others, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, and Zora Neale Hurston. Samuel Beckett provided translations of French contributions, and Cunard saw herself as the “maker,” a guiding hand of an international collective, working with a burning energy despite the hate letters.

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From The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth. Copyright © 2024. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.