{"id":2329,"date":"2025-01-16T12:40:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T12:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/?p=2329"},"modified":"2025-03-02T11:07:25","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T11:07:25","slug":"2329-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? Alexander Trocchi and Samuel Beckett from Paris 5, 6 & 7e to Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amy Grandvoinet<\/strong>
\nAHRC-funded PhD student<\/strong><\/p>\n

An aeon article with web-address ending \u2018psychogeography-where-writers-should-now-fear-to-tread\u2019 features just one snap: a gigantic portrait of Samuel Beckett on a Notting Hill wall (1). The article regrets psychogeography\u2019s diminished status today as a formulaic literary genre, whereby writers traverse urban landscapes and scribe about them whilst celebrating an avant-garde canon. Psychogeography\u2019s not what it was, says aeon, tired and depoliticised since its radical origins in the 1950s and 60s. Defined by Paris-based Lettrist and Situationist Internationals (1952 to 1957 and 1957 to 1972 respectively) ex\u00e9cutif Guy Debord as \u2018the study of the precise laws of the specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals\u2019, ancien psychogeography wasn\u2019t a creative writing prompt, but a means of analysing the social production of space in an immediate post-war milieu aligned with Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2). En fait, Lettrists and Situationists were very sceptical about artistic production under the hyper-commodifying global order they dubbed \u2018the Spectacle\u2019 (3). Beckett\u2019s position within this picture is left silent; aeon mentions him no further beyond the snap-caption, yet Beckett was significantly embroiled in the Rive Gauche worlds from which psychogeography hatched.<\/p>\n

For Lettrists and Situationists, a \u2018psychogeographer [\u2026] explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena\u2019 (4). It is important to note Lettrists and Situationists did write occasional literature (albeit sardonically) relating to their psychogeographical work as such, and there were some artists they believed to be good. Beckett was one of them. In her \u2018Preface in the Guise of an Autobiography (or Vice Versa)\u2019 to the recent English translation of La nuit (1960), Mich\u00e8le Bernstein, first wife of Debord and co-founding Lettrist and Situationist, cites \u2018our Beckett\u2019 outlining the complex inspirations behind her own deviant novels (5). A distant influence? A covert acquaintance? It is extremely unlikely Beckett identified as a psychogeographer, and one of my PhD supervisors (a Lettrist-Situationist specialist) confirms he\u2019s found not much of Beckett in the field, but assumes they all must have crossed paths at least now and then. A Beckett-scholar friend tells me it\u2019s notoriously tough to locate Beckett\u2019s encounters with others in Paris as, of course, people met everywhere in-person often spontaneously. It is fairly well understood, though, that Beckett was friends with Alexander Trocchi, member of both Lettrist and Situationist Internationals and editor of little magazine Merlin and Collection Merlin which published some of his most renowned Anglophone fiction in 1950s pa\u0281i.<\/p>\n

I wanted to come to The Samuel Beckett Research Centre (hereafter the Beckett Centre) to learn whether anything in the Beckett Collection at Reading University\u2019s Archive explicitly or implicitly evidences any psychogeography utterances between Beckett and Trocchi or otherwise. Funnily enough, I grew up nearby, twenty minutes down the A329(M) in a New Town called Bracknell, just the kind of urban development the mid-century Parisian Left Bank\u2019s intelligentsia lamented as the epitome of ultra-functionalist Corbusian \u2018machines for living\u2019 civic designs, optimising Capital and not much else. Psyched. I knew Trocchi partook in the d\u00e9rive, i.e. observing the city \u00e0 pied, with Debord (\u2018I remember long, wonderful psychogeographical walks [\u2026] with Guy\u2019) and Beckett is apparently famous for street walking (Steven Matthews, the Beckett Centre\u2019s director, immediately recalled footage of Beckett drifting through Berlin as we planned my visit, and more than three friends readily commended Beckett\u2019s sun-tanned imago cavorting down boulevards) (6). But besides any investigative walking, as I got them both Trocchi and Beckett were concerned generally with questions like: where are our bodies situated, and how? what are their capacities, or incapacities, and why? how might we orientate ourselves under present historical circumstances?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Much of the Beckett Collection is archived in a big brick box at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), University of Reading London Road Campus. Steven laughed Beckett would have found that hilarious. Steven and I met on Tuesdays, and remarked how all that Paris activity\u2019s all locked away now . . .<\/p>\n

But nuh-uh! People keep getting stuff out and doing stuff with it. See the Beckett Centre website\u2019s Projects, Creative Fellowships, Talking Beckett Series, and Beckett Forum pages, and also Tolka Issue 7 (7).<\/p>\n

Aside from the big brick box, the Beckett Centre is essentially a conceptual entity. There are no glass sliding doors announcing the Samuel Beckett Research Centre in frosted sans-serif font, no gift-shop selling Samuel Beckett Official Merchandise such as rubbers and pencils and postcartes. Indeed no Wonderful World of Samuel Beckett theme-park aesthetic as another of my PhD supervisors jestfully conjectured. Still, magnificent photographs of Beckett and austere scenes from his plays are mounted around the MERL Reading Room, and James Joyce\u2019s fountain pen accessorised with a Finnegans Wake (1938) charm is displayed in a cabinet in an understated entrance foyer. Prior to arrival, I\u2019d searched the Beckett Collection for \u2018psychogeography\u2019 via the Online Database yielding zero result, so had entered \u2018trocchi\u2019 and \u2018merlin\u2019 and \u2018walk\u2019 alternatively, which invoked over thirty items. Lots (Steven\u2019s recommendation was music and coffee against archive fever). James Knowlson\u2019s heroic authorised biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett<\/em> (2014) would be permanent company at my desk (No. 1) across the semaines deux, while cardboard tray batches of called-up artefacts awaited me daily (thank you Michele, thank you Emma). I\u2019d examine siphonings from the big brick box at the ephemeral Beckett Centre 9.30am til 4.30pm Tuesdays to Fridays, then continue to immerse myself in Beckett\u2019s sentence-outputs at the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading in a cell-like room (which of course felt \u2018Beckettian\u2019) into the night (8).<\/p>\n

So it began. Ten working days (more-or-less) of questful delving, hoping to better-place Beckett within, or outside of, Trocchi\u2019s psychogeographic-minded coterie circles. What follows is a conglomeration of information discovered at the Beckett Centre organised into nine locations somewhat shared, each living in Paris 1937 to 1989 and 1949 to the late 1950s, by Beckett and Trocchi. Biographic info is mostly taken from Knowlson\u2019s all-hallowed Beckett Bible and from Andrew Murray Scott\u2019s more controversial Alexander Trocchi: The Making of a Monster<\/em> (2012). Copyright is massive at the Beckett Centre, so my sharings from Beckett Collection artefacts can only be limited and confined to paraphrase, but their archival whereabouts is duly referenced so that if you really want to, you can go to the Beckett Centre and enjoy their gospel directly. Read on if you have any remote interest in continuing to find out about Beckett in the context of psychogeography, or psychogeography in the context of Samuel Beckett.<\/p>\n

37 rue de la B\u00fbcherie (Librairie Mistral)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trocchi and his then-girlfriend Alice Jane Lougee (Jane) set up Merlin in 1952, and its HQ was the now-cult-followed Shakespeare & Company Bookshop at 37 rue de la B\u00fbcherie Paris 7e opposite Notre-Dame. It may not have been selling cronuts and matcha lattes, but was open \u2013 as Librairie Mistral \u2013 weekdays midday-to-midnight and Sundays for tea from 1951. Librairie Mistral\u2019s founder, George Whitman, changed its name in 1964 to celebrate William Shakespeare\u2019s four-hundredth birthday and in homage to Sylvia Beach\u2019s original Shakespeare & Company Bookshop at 12 rue l\u2019Od\u00e9on, a hot-hub for \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers such as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, until its closure in 1941 during World War Two (9). Beckett had gone there, and was part of the scene, pals with Joyce whose Finnegans Wake<\/em> he assisted on. By the time Trocchi got to the City of Light, things had moved intellectually on. In Paris Interzone<\/em> (1994), James Campbell says Merlin was a new publication distinguished by \u2018a particular intelligence\u2019, intending to surpass influential existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre\u2019s Les Temps Modernes<\/em> established in 1945 to \u2018give an account of the present, as complete and faithful as possible\u2019 (10). Trocchi, like Beckett, was well-connected, soon hanging out with the razer-sharp Lettrists (he appears at 6:11 in Debord\u2019s film Critique de la Separation<\/em> (1961) which documents their early-50s psychogeographically-guided proceedings) (11). Like Beckett\u2019s, Lettrists approved Trocchi\u2019s writing as of decent integrity. A pale yellow folder in the Beckett Centre packed with 1990s missives from Jane to Knowlson detail Merlin\u2019s early printing logistics at Imprim\u2019ier Mazarie nearby and Fonteney-aux-Roses in the suburbs: Merlin #1 came out in May, and Merlin #2 in Autumn. Merlin #2 features co-editor Richard Seaver\u2019s essay \u2018Samuel Beckett: An Introduction\u2019, penned after snatching up Beckett\u2019s Molloy<\/em> (1951) and Malone meurt<\/em> (1951) from Les Editions de Minuit\u2019s shop window at 7 rue Bernard-Palissy (12).<\/p>\n

Merlin wanted Beckett. Copies were sent to he and J\u00e9r\u00f4me Lindon, who\u2019d told Seaver a certain English novel of his still sought publication. Merlin was by no means a Lettrist wing (they had their own periodical Potlatch<\/em>), but loosely associated and with kindred objectives, but reading Beckett\u2019s early writing in mind of its psychogeography-ish appeal seems fructiferous. Before Molloy<\/em> and Malone meurt<\/em>, in which old ill and woeful Molloy is failingly searched for by detective Moran then Malone reflects on his deathbed, Beckett\u2019s More Pricks Than Kicks’ <\/em>(1934) short stories comment abundantly on contemporary environs and the constituent human moods they effect. Dublin-based young man Belacqua (named after a minor character in Dante\u2019s Divina Commedia<\/em> (1321)) escapades with familiars eating lobster gorgonzola toast, remarking ruins and Portrane Lunatic Asylum, reading, feeling like a \u2018sad animal\u2019, and attempting to tackle \u2018the Furies\u2019 by going hither and thither to no avail (13). Beckett had just undergone a stretch of difficult psychotherapy in Belsize Park. In Murphy<\/em> (1938), Beckett\u2019s first novel, Murphy\u2019s adrift in London, and withdraws from life to a troubled rocking-chair. I found a piece in The Stinging Fly<\/em> where Cathy Sweeney reads First Love (1973), written in 1943 during his service in the French Resistance, and detects Beckett\u2019s ability to offer \u2018the being\u2019 of characters uniquely (14). Conor Carville, a colleague of Steven\u2019s at the Beckett Centre, deems some of Beckett\u2019s t\u00f4t poetry \u2018almost psychogeographical\u2019 \u2013 see for instance lines on Saint-L\u00f4, where Beckett was stationed at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in 1945, as \u2018bombed out of existence in one night\u2019 bringing \u2018the trauma of a new situation encountered face to face\u2019 (also documented as \u2018The Capital of Ruins\u2019 in the Irish Times) (15). Beckett\u2019s foci matched perfectly what Trocchi\u2019s debut editorial classified ‘good writing with a social function not aesthetically compromised geared up to treat an Orwellian now’ (16).<\/p>\n

D\u00e9p\u00f4t at 8 rue du Sabot<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett wrote to Trocchi in February 1953: \u2018Watt is at your disposal whenever you like. I\u2019ll have it round as soon as I get back to Paris\u2019 (17). Trocchi and Jane were living rent-free in Seaver\u2019s house, an ex-banana-drying warehouse in Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e8s. They waited. Seaver remembers: \u2018We had all but given up when one rainy afternoon, at the rue du Sabot banana-drying d\u00e9p\u00f4t, a knock came at the door and a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat handed in a manuscript in a black imitation-leather binding, and left us almost without a word. That night half a dozen of us [\u2026] sat up half the night and read Watt<\/em> aloud, taking turns till our voices gave out. If it took many more hours than that it should have, it was because we kept pausing to wait for the laughter to subside\u2019 (18). Hourra! On a muffly CD at the Beckett Centre labelled \u2018Hardly used in the biography or anywhere else\u2019, Jane remembers to Knowlson that night too, and says Merlin writers often gathered at 8 rue du Sabot because Trocchi was an excellent cook (contrary to mine and Sharon Kivland\u2019s hypotheses), but that when Beckett visited he only ever stood in the doorway (19). Jane seems to think Beckett was lovely, real, old-fashioned, and quite unlike the rest of them but sympathetic. In a letter to literary agent George Reavey in May 1953 Beckett mentions \u2018the Merlin Juveniles\u2019.<\/p>\n

Watt<\/em> (1953) would be published on the last day of August by Collection Merlin, an imprint of Olympia Press governed by Maurice Girodias, who Jane says Beckett disliked. Girodias\u2019s papa was Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press, for whom Beckett had almost translated the Marquis de Sade (did he see Debord\u2019s screening of Hurlements en faveur de Sade<\/em> (1952) at 17 Place du Trocad\u00e9ro?). Trocchi, Christopher Logue, Austryn Wainhouse, and others from Merlin wrote erotic or \u2018db\u2019 (dirty books) fiction under Olympia Press\u2019s Traveller\u2019s Companion series to buoy up funds (so did ex-Situationist Raoul Vaneigem with L\u2019Ile aux delices<\/em> (1979) much later with \u00c9ditions du B\u00e9b\u00e9 Noir). Beckett\u2019s Watt<\/em> was differently bodily-oriented. The extract he chose as a preview for Merlin<\/em> #3, Winter 1952-3 (one of four issues held by the Beckett Centre), depicts Watt\u2019s observations of master Knott in mundane hilarity: \u2018As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all\u2019, and so on. And \u2018Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire\u2019, and so on. And then on Sunday Mr Knott moves his furniture about in an incessant feng shui which continues Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and r\u00e9p\u00e9ter alllllll the way to \u2018Sunday week\u2019 then \u2018Friday fortnight\u2019 before closing \u2013 \u2018And then, while he put on the one, the black boot, the brown shoe, the black slipper, the brown boot, the black shoe, the brown slipper, on the one foot, he held the other tight, lest it should escape, or put it in his pocket, or put it in his mouth, or put his foot upon it, or put it in a drawer, till he might put it on, on the other foot\u2019 (20). Watt\u2019s room is bare and dingy with a single window through which a racecourse is visible, and stars Watt gazes at when he cannot sleep. In a \u2018Letter from Paris\u2019 in Nimbus Quarterly<\/em>, Summer 1953, Trocchi wrote: \u2018Beckett\u2019s characters (Molloy, Malone, Watt) are so inactive, so vegetable, that they are also in a queer and disquieting way in revolt\u2019 (21). As states Andre Furlani, Beckett\u2019s characters are never bourgeois fl\u00e2neurs, Surrealist d\u00e9ambulatists, or psychogoegrapher-d\u00e9rivers (22). Their tragi-comically compromised subjectivities dramatise the atrocities of human thingification.<\/p>\n

Merlin<\/em> #3\u2019s announcement of upcoming Watt<\/em> (twenty-five signed copies lettered A to Y and one-thousand-one-hundred regular numbered copies payable in francs or pounds or dollars) praises Beckett in comparison to Franz Kafka (another writer Lettrists and Situationists broadly condoned). Trocchi\u2019s editorial is busy correcting \u2018art for art\u2019s sake\u2019 accusations, Seaver addresses politics head-on in an essay \u2018Revolt and Revolution\u2019, and at the back there\u2019s a chance to order loads (many if not all Lettrist-Situationist approved) more books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Andr\u00e9 Breton, Albert Camus, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Andr\u00e9 Gide, Julien Gracq, Comte de Lautr\u00e9amont, Lefebvre, Andr\u00e9 Malraux, Marcel Proust, and Sartre, via Librairie Mistral. Merlin<\/em> #4, Spring-Summer 1953 (two of four issues held by the Beckett Centre), celebrating \u2018beckett samuel beckett samuel beckett samuel beckett samuel beckett samuel beckett samuel\u2019 across its back-cover touting the now-available tome (23). Beckett wasn\u2019t joyeux, though, ruing the \u2018awful magenta\u2019 cover in a letter to Reavey in September, as well as mass (eighty) spelling and typographical errors including an entire omitted sentence on page nineteen (Beckett\u2019s miffed annotations in his own personal copy (number eight-five) can be viewed at the Beckett Centre from a special foam plinth) (24).<\/p>\n

Chez Moineau, 22 rue du Four<\/strong><\/p>\n

Drinking, thinking, and writing was a classic combo in Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e8s, already becoming a tourist destination as such. I can find no verification Beckett mixed with Lettrists and Situationists at their favoured caf\u00e9 Chez Moineau (22 rue du Four), though his frequentations of more upmarket Caf\u00e9 Deux Magot, Caf\u00e9 de Flore, Closerie des Lilas, the D\u00f4me, the Cigogne, the Iles Marquises, Chez Tournon, La Coupole et cetera are well-documented (Knowlson\u2019s biography indexes over thirty entries under \u2018drinking\u2019). Another founding member of the Situationist International and solo London Psychogeographical Society component also living in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, Ralph Rumney, remembers Moineau\u2019s as \u2018more or less the only place we were welcome or at least well received\u2019 being \u2018extremely disreputable, scruffy, scurrilous, and penniless\u2019 (25). Did Trocchi even mingle here, always turned-out and with money on him says Logue? They weren\u2019t close, but Rumney knew Trocchi as editor of Merlin<\/em> (which he describes as \u2018a magazine of the Anglo-intellectual expat scene in Paris\u2019) and as courteous (\u2018he put me up\u2019). Beckett\u2019s and Rumney\u2019s link is more convoluted, and pertains to some darkness. At the Beckett Centre, in a Peggy Guggenheim folder is Rumney\u2019s obituary from 2002 titled \u2018Ralph Rumney: Co-founder of the Situationist International accused by Peggy Guggenheim of murdering her daughter\u2019 (26). Pegeen died of an overdose in 1967 while married to Rumney since 1958, and having birthed their child Sandro. Peggy\u2019s reputation as patron and affair-monger came with toxicity \u2013 \u2018You\u2019re f***ing your way up to quite a collection\u2019 said she to Pegeen who Rumney simply gifted a painting Peggy\u2019d wanted to purchase. Beckett and Peggy had dallianced in the late 1930s; the folder also contains photocopies of pages from Guggenheim\u2019s m\u00e9moire about it, plus a French ELLE<\/em> (No. 2273 Juliett 1989) article on she and her sex-life with an image of Beckett described \u2018L\u2019\u00e9crivain irlandais est tr\u00e8s grand, tres timide, tres m\u00e9lancolique, jeune (il a 31 ans) et tres s\u00e9duisant\u2019. What Beckett later thought of it all seems crucial in ways I can\u2019t hope to know and don\u2019t wish to gossip about. Anyway, Beckett and Trocchi, according to Jane, met to discuss writing matters at a private bar which remains unidentifiable (quite right).<\/p>\n

\u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure Paris 75005<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett, Trocchi, and the Lettrists and Situationists perhaps had in common an appetite for meaningful thought outside the academy (and not always in pubs). Both Trocchi and Beckett came to Paris\u2019s literati post degree-level study, English & Philosophy at Glasgow University and French & Italian at Trinity College Dublin. After a lecturing stint at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure, 45 rue d\u2019Ulm 1928 to 1930, Beckett realised an academic profession was not for him, though his hunger for learning hardly waned. Steven and Matthew Feldman recently collated reams of \u2018Philosophy Notes\u2019 Beckett made over his lifetime (ancient Greeks through to nineteenth-century nihilism) using his \u2018note-snatching\u2019 method, considering having not covered a philosophical canon as an undergraduate a \u2018serious defect\u2019 (27). Although Beckett\u2019s notes are fairly irreverent (sometimes scribbling expressions like \u2018Tra-la-la-la\u2019 and allegedly quipping \u2018I never understand anything they write\u2019), Beckett was philosophically-dedicated, his interests particularly gravitated toward the psychoanalysis he absorbed totally. More non-swottish scrawls were found alongside these papers in a trunk in Beckett\u2019s cellar posthumously from gallery visits, including on Claude Lorrain\u2019s paintings which Lettrists and Situationists loved (28). Trocchi was similarly passionate. Edwin Morgan regarded him a most talented (and maverick) student, and a travel scholarship funded his move to Paris following Royal Navy conscription 1943 to 1946. Trocchi later schemed project sigma as \u2018a worldwide linking up of intellectuals, poets and writers to effect a revolutionary transformation of Western Society\u2019 avec free universities, outlined in \u2018A Revolutionary Proposal: The Invisible Insurrection of A Million Minds\u2019 in the Situationist journal Internationale Situationniste (29). Its ideas still iterate now (30). The Situationists were instrumental in the student and worker uprisings of May \u201968, occupying Strasbourg, Nanterre, and Sorbonne universities, where Beckett appears by a statue of Auguste Comte in one of few photos in Knowlson\u2019s biography (31).<\/p>\n

6 rue des Favorites<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett invited Trocchi to his apartment at 6 rue des Favorites (where he lived with Suzanne D\u00e9chevaux-Dumesnil), arm\u2019s length from Saint Germain in 15e down long, long rue de Vaugirard. It was high up, desk at the living-room window (Knowlson tells us Beckett \u2018felt very miserable when he was deprived of light\u2019) next to which was a waste-paper basket keeping a bottle of whisky. Steven joked Beckett lived on whisky-spiked French onion soup at some point probably (I immediately buy tins of Lidl French onion soup returning to Aberystwyth). Murray Scott says Beckett had Trocchi round often and once even made him \u2018a breakfast of kippers\u2019 (32)! Fuel for psychogeography. Jane reminisces a relaxed hour in 1953 in which she and Trocchi were at Beckett\u2019s, talking about how funny it was Jane\u2019s dad lived in Limerick in Maine while there was a Limerick in Ireland. Jane divulged she\u2019d sold her car to help get Merlin<\/em> going in addition to their tutoring and translating and Trocchi\u2019s dbs, and Beckett spoke of struggles he\u2019d had getting Watt<\/em> anywhere in England. It is a pleasant vignette. Trocchi was at this time completing his novel Young Adam<\/em> (1954), on Glasgow-Edinburgh barge-skipper assistant Joe, soon to be published in France under pseudonym Frances Lengel due to illicit content (it\u2019s now listed in The Scottish Book Trust\u2019s Best 100 Scottish Books of All Time) (33). In the same folder as Jane\u2019s correspondence with Knowlson, there\u2019s a letter from Beckett to Trocchi I can hardly make out because the handwriting\u2019s sooo relax\u2019dly slanted, but which seems to thank intimately-addressed dear Alex for a letter he\u2019d sent, and that Young Adam is very good c o n g r a t u l a t i o n s.<\/p>\n

Knowlson says Beckett found Paris increasingly difficult from the 1950s, too many appointments and too much epistolary upkeep in a city he referred to as \u2018petrol chamber\u2019. Incidentally, car proliferation was a key motivation for the instigation of psychogeography, a recurring gripe in Lettrist and Situationist bulletins (34). Paris was changing rapidly. H\u00f4tel particulieurs slum the Marais (where Debord and Bernstein had temporarily nested) was disappearing, by 1968 historic Les Halles market had been demolished (replaced by an RER terminal plus shopping-and-entertainment facilities), Beaubourg in 1969 became the crass Pompidou Centre, and in the 70s peripheral grands ensembles (for example Sarcelles) had sucked the working-class populations out of the inner-city where white-collar residents doubled (35). Beckett and Suzanne had a house built in Ussy-sur-Marne in the early-50s, forty miles (sixty kilometres continentally) North-East of Paris, where they\u2019d bolt to regularly. While at the Beckett Centre, I forayed into Reading town-centre to assess the changes there since my pre-2011 Berkshire-zones life: all still locked in a ring of A-roads and roundabouts, there is no more emo-destination Shakeaway Milkshake Bar on Union Street (but still Timpsons and phone shops e.g. PHONE CITY), smashed up Edwardian Harris Arcade just about manages to sell tobacco and vinyl though mainly is derelict, a gentrified Brixton\/Peckham\/Shoreditch-style shipping-container street food conglomeration (Blue Collar Corner) mushrooms in an abandoned yard on Hosier Street, millennium-2000 shopping centre The Oracle (once glaringly glitzy) looks pretty drab.<\/p>\n

Party-Time at 5 rue Vaneau<\/strong><\/p>\n

Five photographs from a Merlin party, December 1953, in the Beckett Centre\u2019s Merlin file, are beguiling (36). In spite of being Merlin\u2019s blue-eyed boy, Beckett\u2019s as-far-as-is-tellable not present. As well as Watt<\/em>, Minuit had now released L\u2019Innommable<\/em> (1953), third in the so-called trilogy after Molloy<\/em> and Malone meurt<\/em>, too. The party was on a Wednesday (9th) 5-7.30pm at 5 rue Vaneau Paris 7e, \u00e0 la maison de Important-Author enthusiasts Mr and Mrs Clements. Photo I, Trocchi is broad and charismatic in tailored suit (herringbone?) talking to Seaver also dressed smartly in jacket-and-tie before a three-flamed candelabra and large metal clock. Photo II, Trocchi smirks with Jane who laughs in off-shoulder black dress and drop-pearl earrings; they sit on a satin floral sofa, both wearing Merlin logo-pins (black silhouettes of the falco columbarius or pigeon-hawk known for its vision and boldness and formidability). Photo III is Trocchi, Seaver, and George Plimpton of The Paris Review<\/em>. Photo IV, Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco and Trocchi admire Merlin<\/em>\u2019s latest issue. In Photo V, everyone (still no Beckett) comes together by a table of snacks and beverages. Where was Beckett instead? Strolling the Jardin du Luxembourg or Parc Montsouris? Playing tennis on the tennis-court, or Hayden or Schubert on the piano, or chess with Marcel Duchamp amid bepop and jazz and smoke-puffs? Enjoying sweet \u2018square words\u2019 word-game invented with colleague and lover Pamela Mitchell who he\u2019d just met? Dining at the Les Invalides Air Terminal restaurant on ham spinach sandwiches and Beaujolais? Not going to the zoo which he considered distasteful? Knowlson provides idiosyncratic intel infinitely superior to Sky Arts\u2019s 2023 biopic scoring a way-too-generous forty-two percent on Rotten Tomatoes (37).<\/p>\n

The English Bookshop, 42 rue de Seine<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear why but Merlin had moved their address in Autumn 1953 to the English Bookshop at 42 rue de Seine, run by proprietress Ga\u00efte Frog\u00e9 from Brittany. It was smaller than Librairie Mistral and more discriminate in stock (classics and new avant-garde). Merlin<\/em> #5 (three of four issues held by the Beckett Centre) from this new location presents an excerpt from Collection Merlin\u2019s forthcoming English translation of Molloy<\/em> that Beckett and Patrick Bowles (\u2018an English inebriate living in Majorca\u2019 who\u2019s \u2018pleasant to work with\u2019 wrote Beckett to Pamela November 1953) had started and would finally finish January 1955 in an arduous process Pim Velhurst and Dillen Wout have nobly traced out of obscurity (38). December, Beckett wrote again to Pamela sick with Molloy<\/em> and wishing it would snow. Merlin<\/em> #5 opens advertising Collection Merlin\u2019s already-available products (incl. Watt<\/em>) and pending publications (incl. Molloy<\/em>), followed by another Trocchi editorial emphasising the \u2018serious writer\u2019 over \u2018popular writing\u2019 (a Lettrist-Situationist-esque distinction) (39). The Molloy<\/em> tract\u2019s illustrated by a mad drawing of a mad man with mad hair and mad v-neck top and mad fish-like hands, and opens from the novel\u2019s paragraph premier: \u2018I am in my mother\u2019s room. It\u2019s I who live there now\u2019. External landscapes which uncanny figures \u2018A\u2019 and \u2018C\u2019 negotiate \u2018and not only that but the within, all the inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath\u2019 unfold, before the passage finishes twenty-three pages on with a burning sulphur and phosphorous horizon Molloy is bound to. Molloy, Malone Dies<\/em>, and The Unnameable<\/em> (Beckett translated the second two himself) are known as tales of profound lostness, loneliness, despair and panic (40). They capture the mass schizophrenia of a traumatised epoch. Psycho-geography?<\/p>\n

Merlin<\/em>\u2019s penultimate issue, #6 (four of four issues held by the Beckett Centre, and now declaring itself \u2018one of the few serious international reviews\u2019 which \u2018faithfully exposes the intellectual climate on both sides of the Atlantic\u2019) printed Beckett\u2019s and Seavers\u2019 \u2018The End\u2019, originally \u2018La Fin\u2019 in Les Temps Moderne<\/em>, in Summer-Autumn 1954. Strangely, Merlin<\/em> #6\u2019s back-cover is a perfume ad \u2013 le Meilleur parfum du monde (41). Surely a hoax? In a huge editorial \u2018words and war\u2019 pages three-to-five cont. two-hundred-and-nine-to-two-hundred-and-seven, Trocchi berates \u2018the East-West deadlock today\u2019 and news discourse that lulls listeners into binary thinking, a scenario to be busted if global sanity\u2019s to be gained outside of the (nuclear) war economy (writers should not be \u2018literary courtiers of this new Versailles\u2019 but urgently exteriorise \u2018emotively significant psychological states\u2019 coterminous with \u2018affective\u2019 environments to encourage reason). \u2018The End\u2019 starts on page six (\u2018They dressed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was to be used for, it was my travelling expenses. When it was gone, they said, I would have to get some more, if I wanted to go on travelling\u2019) and lasts eighteen pages depicting disappearing buildings and morphing slogans and a river that seems like it\u2019s going backwards and more, amplifying l\u2019horreur claustrophobie. Trocchi\u2019s short story \u2018The Rum and the Pelican\u2019 lies adjacent \u2013 a man is aware of his \u2018gradual decay\u2019 as the planet\u2019s \u2018going from bad to worse\u2019, plot hinging on a regular bus-route that passes tinglingly a colossal Martinique poster-woman. Merlin<\/em> #6 closes on black and red uprising stick-men, and notification of an Abbaye Rotisserie with medieval atmosphere event at 22 rue Jacob: seventy years on scrolling Instagram a Story I glimpse promotes a Techno Medieval Banquet Night happening in Leeds this October, and much seems undifferent.<\/p>\n

There\u2019d been hullabaloo around paying Beckett for Watt<\/em> (late), translating Molloy<\/em> (long), and publishing \u2018The End\u2019 (full of mistakes). At the Beckett Centre, there\u2019s a Beckett-Merlin<\/em> correspondence folder where you can read all about it (42). August 1954 Beckett wrote to Pamela \u2018Have written a stinker to Trocchi. Fed up with them\u2019. Basically, though, it all got resolved or blew over. Trocchi and Beckett were not \u2018on speaking terms\u2019 for a bit, as Beckett wrote to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in October, but Beckett and \u2018the Merlin lads\u2019 were soon out together for dinner when he wrote to A. J. Leventhal November the following year (after the final issue of Merlin<\/em>, #7, Summer-Autumn 1955), and in 1958 Beckett wrote to Seaver that Logue had been over \u2018in good form\u2019 and that he and Bowles (whose recent poems he \u2018liked very much\u2019) had met for lunch in the last fortnight, adding \u2018Remember me to Trocchi if you write to him\u2019 (43). Trocchi left Paris for New York in the late 50s and completed Cain\u2019s Book<\/em> (1960), which quotes Beckett directly at length (\u2018This time I know where I am going\u2019 and then much about playing and to be able to play alone even in the dark and that to \u2018To have been able to conceive such a plan is encouraging\u2019) (44). Further, \u2018stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake\u2019 might be a reference to Beckett\u2019s poem after Watt<\/em> (\u2018of the empty heart \/ of the empty hands \/ of the dark mind stumbling \/ through barren lands\u2019). Beckett continued to read and appreciate Trocchi\u2019s work; he wrote to Seaver in 1958 saying he’d read a portion of Cain\u2019s Book<\/em> in Evergreen<\/em> and \u2018liked it very much indeed\u2019 and to Judith Schmidt (Rosset\u2019s assistant) on having read it all that it was \u2018Very good indeed I think. Shall be writing to Trocchi next semi-lucid intermission\u2019. Too, Knowlson told Jane on the muffly CD he read Cain\u2019s Book<\/em> because Beckett instructed him so.<\/p>\n

Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de Babylone, Boulevard Raspail<\/strong><\/p>\n

So\u2026 no explicit recorded utterance of psychogeography between Trocchi and Beckett, no hard evidence Beckett ever met any Lettrist or Situationist other than Trocchi. Any further conversation and path-crossing can only be speculative. Steven said the Merlin boys must have attended the debut of En attendant Godot<\/em> (1952) at Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de Babylone 38 Boulevard Raspail back in January 1953 \u2013 maybe all of the Lettrists were there too, debriefing afterwards on its psychogeographical acumen? Applauding Beckett\u2019s shrewd hijacking of Spectacular culture? I heard in the archives Beckett was gutted for having had to turn down New York Broadway\u2019s proposition pitch that Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando play Didi and Gogo. The Waiting for Godot<\/em> (1954) West-End team (Ben Whishaw, Lucien Msamati et. al.) were at the Beckett Centre a mere week prior to my visit to prepare for their 2024 Haymarket hijinks.<\/p>\n

Steven told me Beckett\u2019s attention to spatiality is typically most-recognised in respect to his dramatic works (R\u00f3n\u00e1n McDonald mentions \u2018the spare Beckettian stage\u2019 as the paragon). Beckett in theatre is maybe metteur en scene most obviously. A scene-setter, a scientist experimenting with conditions and outcomes. Were Situationists in the audiences of Fin de partie<\/em> (1957) or Krapp\u2019s Last Tape<\/em> (1958) or Oh les beaux jours<\/em> (1963) or Play<\/em> (1964) thinking so? Beckett is fastidious in his stagely directives. In Footfalls<\/em> (1976) a mother (\u2018Woman\u2019s voice (V)\u2019) and daughter (\u2018May (M)\u2019) poise between \u2018(pacing)\u2019 and \u2018(Pause.)\u2019-ing for twenty-five minutes according to precise step-sequences, set scant (Steven recommended its draft manuscripts jammed, on gridded paper, with Beckett\u2019s equation and diagram workings-out) (45). At the end, V asks M \u2018Will you never have done . . . revolving it all? (Pause.) It? (Pause.) It all. (Pause.) In your poor mind\u2019\u2026 Probably not?! Beckett\u2019s workings out for QUAD<\/em> (1981) for German telly are similar, where Beckett maps a choreography of four numbered and colour-lit percussion-accompanied players (preferably ballet-trained) in hooded floor-length gowns round and intersecting at diagonal lines a six-pace-sided square (46). John Green gave a conference paper on QUAD<\/em> and psychogeography in 2020 at the National University of Ireland, Galway, which is not readily available online but its abstract states: \u2018Samuel Beckett and Guy Debord both experienced walking as therapeutic exercise, a psycho-physical conduit to creative revelation\u2019 and that \u2018Walking as act, as dream, as memory, defines the consciousness of Beckett\u2019s characters\u2019 \u2013 keywords Theatre, Samuel Beckett, Psychogeography, Situationists, Actor Training (47). Curious.<\/p>\n

I browse the shelves of the Beckett Centre\u2019s Open Access Library Room G07 where a sign reminds you Please ask for assistance if required Please ask for permission before taking photographs, and generate two book-stacks Michele tells me are the tallest she\u2019s seen in two years (#ResearchVirtueSignal). There\u2019s scholarship on: Beckett and wandering, Beckett and home, Beckett and metaphysics, Beckett and void, Beckett and cosmology, Beckett and geometry, Beckett and trauma, Beckett and bodily malfunction, Beckett and prosthetics, Beckett and mechanics, Beckett and love, Beckett and abjection, Beckett and catastrophe, Beckett and slow violence, Beckett and psychoanalysis, Beckett and Ireland, Beckett and diaspora, Beckett and the future, Beckett and comedy, Beckett and mood, Beckett and dream, Beckett and alienation, Beckett and the tragicomic, Beckett and medievalism, Beckett and heroes, Beckett and joy, Beckett and healing, Beckett and hyper-subjectivity, Beckett and ontology, Beckett and the extra-linguistic, Beckett and semiotics, Beckett and Leiblichkeit, Beckett and the extra-socially social, Beckett and the angelic, Beckett and truth, Beckett and materialism, Beckett and sans fronti\u00e8res, Beckett and Romanticism, Beckett and refuge, Beckett and human rights, more. I particularly liked Bert O. States\u2019s title Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (1985). Il n\u2019y a pas beaucoup de temps.<\/p>\n

38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems unlikely Trocchi visited Beckett\u2019s new flat at 38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques, where he moved with Suzanne in 1961. By that time, Trocchi was in New York and San Francisco, getting into trouble with the law and narrowly evading imprisonment (the Situationists wrote to his defence in \u2018Hands Off Alexander Trocchi!\u2019), then would live in London for the rest of his days (48). After Cain\u2019s Book<\/em>, on junkie life and writing as a scow on the Hudson River, Trocchi didn\u2019t publish loads else. sigma garnered some interest for a while; its Sigma Portfolio digest, featuring an updated translation of the \u2018Manifesto Situationniste\u2019 and stressing the need for enduring concentration on \u2018what we call \u201cpsycho-geographic\u201d factors\u2019, circulated among the likes of Jeff Nuttal, Morgan, R. D. Laing, and William Burroughs in the early 1960s. In 1962, Trocchi spoke at the Edinburgh Writers Conference, and in 1965 co-compered the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall starring Allen Ginsburg. Michael Horovitz\u2019s anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain<\/em> (1969) contains four poems by Trocchi, and Calder Publications, who\u2019d become the main publisher of Beckett\u2019s works in English, collated Trocchi\u2019s poetic oeuvre as Man at Leisure<\/em> (1972), and short fiction as The Holy Man and Other Stories<\/em> (2019) posthumously. His unfinished The Long Book<\/em> is unpublished. What does it do? Was Beckett reading it after he\u2019d so enjoyed Cain\u2019s Book<\/em>?<\/p>\n

From Floor 7 at 38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques in 14e closer to 5, 6, & 7, Beckett sat a metal desk overlooking Prisi\u00f3n de La Sant\u00e9 (where the man who near-fatally stabbed him in 1938 was briefly incarcerated) and continued to write prolifically into the 60s and 70s and 80s. Steven recommended Stories and Texts for Nothing<\/em> (1967) for its jumbled and vanishing locations, reminding me of the \u2018vaguening\u2019 and \u2018topophobia\u2019 and \u2018glissading\u2019 techniques Conor mentions in his psychogeography-referencing podcast on Beckett\u2019s poetry (note Beckett was also printed by Horovitz, his poem \u2018hors cr\u00e2ne \/ something there \/ dread nay\u2019 in New Departures in 1975). When May \u201968 was in its full throes (the \u2018Night of the Barricades\u2019 just up the boulevard at Place Denfert-Rochereau) Beckett was poorly and could only follow closely the events in newspapers and via the radio, continuing his bilingual exertions: as well as his plays, cue for example Le D\u00e9peupleur<\/em> (1970) and The Lost Ones<\/em> (1971), Pour finir encore et autres foirades<\/em> and For to End Yet Again<\/em> and Other Fizzles<\/em> (both 1976), Company<\/em> (1980), Mal vu mal dit<\/em> (1981) and Ill Seen Ill Said<\/em> (1982), Worstward Ho<\/em> (1983). The Beckett Centre\u2019s Worstward Ho<\/em> manuscripts are on more grid-paper, designed as if for the stage, organising an ambiguous narrator\u2019s movement in space to beget a kinaesthetic soliloquy: \u2018On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. [\u2026] First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. [\u2026] Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there\u2019 (49). Can you believe Beckett was born on Friday 13th and Good Friday?! The weight of life, and death, and luckiness, past present and future? Both Beckett and Trocchi died in the 80s, Beckett eighty-three and Trocchi fifty-eight. Beckett is buried with Suzanne in, second only to P\u00e8re Lachaise, Paris\u2019s Montparnasse Cemetery, while Trocchi\u2019s ashes are rumoured to be mislaid under mysterious circumstances.<\/p>\n

Whopping thunderstorms at the archives. Beckett and Trocchi were concerned with a lot, dissatisfied with a dissatisfactory world (and absolutely fighting for the more satisfactory, felicitous, and f\u00eate). They implore: keep moving. As Beckett cantilled to Thomas McGreevy in February 1936 \u2018Quando il piede cammina, il cuore gode\u2019 (when the foot walks, the heart rejoices) (50). I think he means it metaphorically and literally, and I think the Lettrist and Situationist psychogeographers would have saluted the sentiment with vigour. If it was not possible to gauge Beckett\u2019s awareness or unawareness of psychogeography visiting the Beckett Centre, could it be reasonable to suggest Beckett, at minimum, shared with Trocchi and the Lettrists and Situationists a psychogeographic sensibility? When Sky News Breakfast was on at the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading at breakfast each morning, I attempted imagining just what Beckett and Trocchi might make of it all \u2013 from ongoing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon to this year\u2019s Para-Olympics in Paris \u2013 betwixt mouthfuls of twenty-first century baked-beans and eggs. It was raining a lot now at the end of September, but all of the Beckett Collection documentations were safe in the Beckett Centre\u2019s big brick box. Precious. Kept. As conkers fell off spiky-chestnut trees and leaves turned copper. Big big big thunderstorms and lightning huge rain. It stops, and the papillons jaunes are eleutheria in the grounds of the Beckett Centre.<\/p>\n

(1) Will Wiles, \u2018Walk the lines\u2019, aeon, 12 Apr, 2017 .
\n(2) Guy Debord, \u2018Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography\u2019, Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition Ken Knabb ed. trans. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).
\n(3) Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Ken Knabb ed. trans. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014).
\n(4) \u2018Definitions\u2019, Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition Ken Knabb ed. trans. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).
\n(5) Mich\u00e8le Bernstein, The Night, 2nd edn. (London: Book Works, 2020).
\n(6) Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010); Francesco Ghisi, \u2018Samuel Beckett in Berlin – 1969\u2019, YouTube, 20 Feb, 2015 .
\n(7) \u2018The Samuel Beckett Research Centre\u2019, University of Reading ; Chlo\u00e9 Duane, \u2018FOUR RESPONSES TO SAMUEL BECKETT\u2019, Tolka 7 (2024).
\n(8) See Luke Thurston, \u2018Samuel Beckett\u2019, British and Irish Literature: Oxford Bibliographies Andrew Hadfield ed. (2012), ; see R\u00f3n\u00e1n McDonald, \u2018Introduction\u2019 in The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett R\u00f3n\u00e1n McDonald ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
\n(9) \u2018A Brief History of a Parisian Bookstore\u2019, Shakespeare & Company Paris (2024) .
\n(10) James Campbell, Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, O and Others on the Left Bank, 1946-60 (London: Minerva, 1994).
\n(11) COUNTER PUBLICS, \u2018Critique of Separation \u2013 Guy Debord \u2013 1961\u2019, YouTube, 23 Feb, 2009 .
\n(12) \u2018Folder entitled Lougee Bryant, Jane and Christopher Logue\u2019 [JEK A\/2\/179], Beckett Collection; James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett 2nd edn. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
\n(13) Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 2010).
\n(14) Cathy Sweeney, \u2018First Love by Samuel Beckett\u2019, The Stinging Fly 34.2 (2016) .
\n(15) Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems Se\u00e1n Lawlor and John Pilling eds. (London: Faber & Faber, 2013).
\n(16) \u2018Folder entitled Trocchi, Alexander\u2019 [JEK A\/2\/292], Beckett Collection.
\n(17) George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
\n(18) Richard Seaver ed., I Can\u2019t Go On, I\u2019ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1976).
\n(19) \u2018Interviews with Jane Lougee-Bryant, and Leonard Fenton\u2019 [JEK C\/1\/108], Beckett Collection.
\n(20) \u2018Merlin: revue trimestrielle. vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1952\/3)\u2019 [70-MER], Beckett Collection.
\n(21) Allan Campbell and Tim Niel eds., A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc, 1997).
\n(22) Andre Furlani, \u2018Samuel Beckett: From the Talking Cure to the Walking Cure\u2019, breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies (2017) .
\n(23) \u2018Merlin: revue trimestrielle. vol. 2, no. 1 (1953\/4)\u2019 [70-MER], Beckett Collection.
\n(24) \u2018Watt \/ Samuel Beckett. 1st ed. 1953\u2019 Copy 2 (no. 85) [30-WAT], Beckett Collection.
\n(25) Ralph Rumney, The Consul: Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. II trans. by Malcom Imrie (London: Verso, 2002).
\n(26) \u2018Folder entitled Guggenheim, Peggy\u2019 [JEK A\/2\/118], Beckett Collection.
\n(27) Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman, Samuel Beckett\u2019s \u2018Philosophy Notes\u2019 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
\n(28) \u2018Folder entitled English Galleries\u2019 [JEK A\/6\/2], Beckett Collection.
\n(29) Alexander Trocchi, \u2018A Revolutionary Proposal: The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds\u2019, Internationale Situationniste 8 .
\n(30) The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
\n(31) See Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias eds., The Situationist International: A Radical Handbook (London: Pluto Press, 2020).
\n(32) Andrew Murray Scott, Alexander Trocchi: The Making of a Monster Revised and Updated edn. (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2012).
\n(33) Willy Maley and Brian Donaldson eds., The 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time (Edinburgh: Scottish Book Trust, 2005); see Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam (London: One World Classics, 2008).
\n(34) See Guy Debord, \u2018Situationist Theses on Traffic\u2019, Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition Ken Knabb ed. trans. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).
\n(35) Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
\n(36) \u2018Merlin group file\u2019 [JEK D\/1\/13], Beckett Collection.
\n(37) \u2018Dance First \u2013 42%\u2019, Rotten Tomatoes .
\n(38) \u2018Part of 73 items of correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Pamela Mitchell sub-series\u2019 [BC MS 5060], Beckett Collection; Pim Verhulst and Dillen Wout, \u2018\u201cI CAN MAKE NOTHING OF IT\u201d: Beckett\u2019s Collaboration with \u201cMerlin\u201d on the English \u201cMolloy\u201d\u2019, Samuel Beckett today\/aujourd\u2019hui 26 (2014).
\n(39) \u2018Merlin :revue trimestrielle. vol. 2, no. 2 (1953\/4)\u2019 [70-MER], Beckett Collection.
\n(40) Samuel Beckett, The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1997).
\n(41) \u2018Merlin :revue trimestrielle. vol. 2, no. 3 (1953\/4)\u2019 [70-MER], Beckett Collection.
\n(42) \u2018Photocopies of Samuel Beckett\u2019s correspondence (dated 1953 \u2013 1954) with the Collection Merlin\u2019 [BC MS 5039], Beckett Collection.
\n(43) George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
\n(44) Alexander Trocchi, Cain\u2019s Book (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
\n(45) Samuel Beckett, Footfalls (London: Faber & Faber, 1978); \u2018Part of Manuscripts: Drama \u2013 Footfalls sub-series\u2019 [BC MSS DRAMA\/FOO], Beckett Collection.
\n(46) \u2018Part of Manuscripts: Drama \u2013 Quad sub-series\u2019 [BC MSS DRAMA\/QUA], Beckett Collection; see no\u00ebl Claude, \u2018U B U W E B Samuel Beckett Quadrat 1+2 1982\u2019, YouTube, 11 Oct, 2012 .
\n(47) John Green, \u2018\u201cOn the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment of Time\u201d: Utilizing Psychogeography in Creating a Live Staging of Samuel Beckett’s QUAD\u2019, CGScholar .
\n(48) Guy Debord, Jacqueline de Jong, and Asger Jorn, \u2018Hands off Alexander Trocchi!\u2019 (1960) .
\n(49) \u2018Part of Manuscripts: Prose \u2013 Worstward ho sub-series\u2019 [BC MSS PROSE\/WOR], Beckett Collectin; Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983).
\n(50) George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-40 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).<\/p>\n

Amy Grandvoinet is a PhD researcher in fraught avant-garde literary legacies (mainly pertaining to the contested signifier \u2018psychogeography\u2019) between Aberystwyth and Cardiff Universities. Her work can be found in SPAMzine, Content Journal, The London Magazine, Worms, The Polyphony, and elsewhere (click linktr.ee\/amy_k_grandvoinet for more). She is part of Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru\u2019s Reinventing the Protagonist 2024-5 writing programme, and is a co-founder of think.material Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? 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Alexander Trocchi and Samuel Beckett from Paris 5, 6 & 7e to Reading Amy Grandvoinet AHRC-funded PhD student An aeon article with web-address...Read More >\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Samuel Beckett Research Centre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-01-16T12:40:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-03-02T11:07:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/109\/2025\/01\/Screenshot-2025-01-16-123916-300x226.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Conor Carville\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@beckettcentre\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@beckettcentre\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Conor Carville\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"33 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/\",\"name\":\"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? - The Samuel Beckett Research Centre\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2025-01-16T12:40:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-03-02T11:07:25+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b320830e2fbc19707ce5840bfc0d9009\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography?\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/\",\"name\":\"The Samuel Beckett Research Centre\",\"description\":\"Promoting Beckett's legacy through creative and scholarly engagement\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b320830e2fbc19707ce5840bfc0d9009\",\"name\":\"Conor Carville\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/99ba20be18b3707195b917801799a2026b710de2312913b00a7fa9330bc20ff2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/99ba20be18b3707195b917801799a2026b710de2312913b00a7fa9330bc20ff2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Conor Carville\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/author\/c-carvillereading-ac-uk\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? - The Samuel Beckett Research Centre","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/2329-2\/","og_locale":"en_GB","og_type":"article","og_title":"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? - The Samuel Beckett Research Centre","og_description":"What\u2019s Sam got to do with psychogeography? 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