On a few occasions Beckett took down passages of Finnegans Wake as Joyce dictated.
Richard
Ellmann
recounts an amusing anecdote told him by Beckett about one such session of dictation. During
the
dictation there was a knock on the door. Joyce said, ‘Come in.’ Beckett
had not noticed
the
knock, so he put Joyce’s words down in the text. When Joyce found out
later, he said, ‘Let it stand.’
Beckett
told Ellmann he
felt ‘fascinated and thwarted’ by this method of writing. (Eugene Webb, 1970, pp. 14-15)
