The fourth paragraph of Beckett's late prose text Worstward Ho reads in its entirety: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Here, very late in his career as a writer, Beckett is conceding that failure – however defined – is, as it were, the condition or fate of writing. This notion of failure, of failure to say exactly what one means, failure to utter what it is that needs to be said – whatever the obscure reasons may be – permeates all of Beckett's writings from the outset in 1929. His very first published story “Assumption” which appeared in the Paris magazine transition in 1929 begins: “He could have shouted but could not.” The central character in this story which Beckett refused to be allowed to be republished during his lifetime dams up utterance inside himself until it is released by the ministrations of another character called Woman – with a capital W – and the release rends him and kills him in Beckett's rather odd version of the Orpheus myth. It is not surprising that Beckett suppressed the story – it is poor by almost any standard. Similarly with Beckett's first extended prose fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he completed in the summer of 1932. He sent the typescript off to the London publisher Chatto and Windus which had published his critical monograph on Proust the year before.