What does "aprob" mean, in this quote from Beckett

Question

Playwright and author Samuel Beckett made the following statement in regards to his short play "Breath", commissioned by one Kenneth Tynan.

"My contribution to the Tynan circus is a forty second piece entitled BREATH … It is simply light coming up and going down on a stage littered with miscellaneous unidentifiable muck, sychronised with sound of breath, once in and out, the whole (ha!) begun and ended by the same tiny vagitus-rattle. I realized when too late to repent that it is not unconnected with

On entre, on crie
Et c’est la vie.
On crie, on sort,
Et c‘est la mort.

If this fails to titillate I hand in my aprob"

When I first read this, I presumed that the closing statement "aprob" was some writerly or theater-land slang for a commission or approval. However, on searching, all the results are circular and point back to this quote. It was originally given in an autobiography of Beckett, which does not define the term.

I cannot find any reference to it as an abbreviation, contraction or acronym. Apparently it is Romanian for "approval" which is a possibility, but it barely makes sense. I find it hard to believe that a writer of Beckett's stature would be using Romanian or made-up words in his correspondence. What does it mean?

Answer 1

@StoneyB 's answer may well be right. I took it in a different way on first reading, which might be worth considering.

Beckett seems to have deliberately coined a new phrase here, "to hand in one's aprob", as an exercise for the reader's imagination. So yes, he may well be hinting at "handing in his approbante", and therefore agreeing (that Breath doesn't titillate)... we're free to understand it that way.

There's also the possibility that he means his approbation, from:

approbate: v. rare 1) approve formally; sanction. "a letter approbating the affair"

In that case, his aprob, could be his "letter of approbation" or "contract" with Tynan. 'Handing in his aprob' would then mean something like resigning, or giving notice of termination of contract. Cf. 'hand in one's notice', 'hand in one's resignation', 'hand in one's sherriff's badge'.

Another thing that points to this reading, is that approbation can be used in the French language (which Beckett uses in the passage, and Tynan could speak) for a formal approval or agreement. e.g.

Pour être reconnus et enregistrés, les jésuites attendent toujours une approbation du ministère de la justice

So, in context (Beckett to Tynan: literary types both; Beckett with surrealist and Joycean influences), it's likely that aprob is a deliberately vague play-on-words, created ad hoc.

Perhaps the best way to unpack the whole thing would be:

If the play fails to titillate, I'll sort of agree, or I'll sort of disagree, and I'll either tear up my poetic licence in despair, or I won't, or none of the above... but I'm not telling you which, and instead I'm just going to write a nonsense phrase that looks like it means something specific, and you can be titillated by puzzling it out between now and whenever Godot shows up...

Answer 2

This is probably a misspelling of the traditional scholarly abbreviation approb. = approbante (or, in the plural, approbantibus), meaning with [NAME] agreeing—for instance:

Thus, in lac. stat. Allen et Bekker, approb. West et Smith, lac. would stand for lacunam, stat. for statuerunt, and approb., for a final meaning of “Allen and Bekker posited a lacuna, with West and Smith agreeing.”— Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship

Beckett treats the Latin ablative absolute as an English nominal, in much the same way as we commonly treat the Latin verb imprimatur—in other words, "If you don't find this titillating I have to agree."