PAGES : Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Becomes Reality

Publisher after publisher rejected “Dream of Fair to Middling Women” when Samuel Beckett submitted it in 1932.

They found the first novel by the then-26-year-old writer either too “literary” or too scandalous.

Even after fame had overtaken him--with “Waiting for Godot,” among other works--Beckett declined to publish the novel that he had written while living at the Hotel Trianon in Paris.

He dismissed it as “the chest into which I threw my wild thoughts,” and worried that the book’s thinly disguised portraits of his Dublin friends were too recognizable.

Beckett did agree that “Middling Women” should be brought out “sometime after my death,” and named his friend Eoin O’Brien, a Dublin physician, to oversee the project to ensure that the book would be a faithful rendition of the original manuscript.

The book has been published as a limited edition in Ireland, and will appear in this country in April from Arcade Publishing.

Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, died in Paris in 1989.