London
3.2.82 [Paris]
It is not stated why Clov cannot sit.
It cannot be because he cannot bend his knees. He could sit with outstretched legs. In squatting there is no seat.
Contact with a seat would therefore seem to be the problem.*
The sea-captain in Knut Hamsun's Hunger arrives standing in a taxi. His trouble severe chronic piles might also do the trick.**
To mention but them.
Pick your fancy...
APCS; 1 leaf, 1 side; with envelope; reproduced here as transcribed in previous publication: Item #49, p.20, Catalogue five, Manuscripts Michael Silverman, London 1991: UoR, MS 3954.
*. Alexander Haydon (b. 1963) would sell the present postcard at Christie's in 1991. He later explained:
In Feb 1982, I was an eighteen-year old student & had been studying Beckett for the entrance
exam to Oxford University [...] It was while studying him that an apparent discrepancy in
Endgame occurred to me: how could Clov squat, if he couldn't sit? So I simply wrote to him
care of Faber & Faber and asked the question. I had never met him, but had read (in Deirdre
Bair's biography) that he endeavored to answer all letters that didn't ask "but what does that
mean"?
(Haydon to the editors, 17 January 1992.)
**. It is not in Knut Hamsun's Hunger but in his 1936 Ringen sluttet (The Ring is Closed) that there appears a ship's officer who is unable to sit down. "I can't sit and I can't lie down, all I can do is stand," he announces -- "I'll stand till I drop." When he leaves his ship, he does indeed do so by taxi: "Unable to sit, he knelt inside the cab. That was how Gregersen the Mate left the Sparrow, and he never came back." (Hamsun, The Ring is Closed, tr. Robert Ferguson [London: Souvenir Press, 2010] 256, 257.)
