some recent reading of mine

Paris

June 6th 1939

dear Tom

I gave the papers to Joyce. He was pleased with the Tristram quotation. Shaw doesn't change front very skilfully



The above is from a letter from Beckett to his friend Thomas McGreevy in London, and Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck, editors of the Letters of Samuel Beckett, wrote in the endnotes:



McGreevy may have sent SB London papers with reviews of Finnegans Wake. SB's reference to the Tristran quotation, possibly supplied by McGreevy, or mentioned in a review, has not been identified. George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the editor of Picture Post on June 3rd 1939 responding to the suggestion in an article on May 13th 1939 by English critic Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985) that he had been so disgusted by Ulysses that he had burned his copy: "'I did not burn it; and I was not disgusted'". (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, III, 444-445)
1--Alan Duncan was a great admirer of Shaw and a close friend of Samuel Beckett who spent the night of 7th January 1938 with Alan and his wife Isabel at Cafe Zeyer in Paris. As the three were returning to the Duncans' apartment, SB was attacked by a stranger, apache as Martin Esslin called him a quarter century later, who stabbed him


2--WB Yeats and Lady Gregory, in their capacity as Abbey Theatre managing-directors, delegated Lennox Robinson to London to gain theatrical experience with Shaw who had established himself firmly in the wake of his overnight Pygmalion success. Robinson, however, resigned from the Abbey in 1914, following a dispute about his decision to keep the theatre open during the mourning period for King Edward VII