Typo Department

All my life I have carried around a mental store of typos, on whose memory I regularly impale myself, and to which I equally regularly add. In my piece on Beckett’s letters, in the new Dublin Review, I notice I refer to Beckett’s wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumensil as Suzanne ‘Dechevaux’-Dumesnil, which I suppose is one step above calling her ‘Deuxchevaux’-Dumesnil, but is still fairly lousy. Or so I thought until (the ever-reliable) wikipedia alerted me to the fact that the woman herself spelt it my wrong way, which is to say the right way. It’s how it’s spelt on her gravestone. Serendipity.

But since I’m on a typo roll here, I may as well point with an inverted sursum corda the note for Krapp’s Last Tape in the new Krapp’s Last Tape and Shorter Plays which records Krapp as having been played by Patrick Magee while ‘Henry was played by Jack MacGowran’. Jack MacGowran played Henry in the first production of Embers. And equally, in Dirk van Hulle’s Compnay etc we are told that Stirrings Still was published in The Guardian on 3 March 1989 and then again in The Manchester Guardian on 19 1989. Let me atone for the pettiness of even noticing these things but posting a poem straight away to wash that nasty taste away.