immediate rapport. Aside from their Dublin roots, they had both earned degrees in languages, loved Dante, and were happily away from their homeland. At the time he met Joyce, Beckett was not considering the idea of becoming a professional writer:
When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came after I found out that I was no good at teaching. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had great admiration for him. (Beckett, as cited in Knowlson 111).
In fact, Beckett proposed to the directeur-adjoint of the Ecole, a Professor BouglT, a thesis for a French doctorate comparing Joyce and Proust. The thesis was discouraged (with the understanding that current, live authors are less academically acceptable than established dead ones), and as Beckett came to accept his inability to teach, he began to focus more on Joyce and the Parisian literary world (Knowlson 107).
By 1929, Beckett had become familiar enough with his mentor and confident enough as a writer to submit a contribution to a critical anthology dealing with Joyce's current project, ôWork in Progress,ö a project of Joyce's that later came to be known as Finnegan's Wake. Beckett's submission, entitled ôDante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce,ö introduced the young Beckett to the literary Parisian readership, strengthened his relationship with Joyce, and allowed him an opportunity to establish the foundations of his own philosophy. Other contributors to the anthology, entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for the Incamination of Work In Progress included Joyce and Beckett's friend Thomas McGreevy, and William Carlos Williams.
The submission offers several striking and challenging comments regarding Joyce and the general reader's inability to comprehend him, yet, at the same time, it is filled with unqualified admiration: ôHere is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, La...