Book review: The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956

And, despite its length, it was not comprehensive, containing only a proportion of the letters consulted. None the less, it was a revelation, a thrilling book for all who love Beckett, not only casting light on his life and work but significantly adding to his oeuvre.

Here’s the second tranche. Initially, it was announced that the war years would be skipped and the volume started in 1945 – and although there’s been a change of heart about the title, nonetheless there are actually no letters reproduced from the period between 1941 and 1945, when Beckett worked with the French Resistance.

The man who then resumes his correspondence is very much changed by his wartime experiences, which he never once refers to directly. Henceforth he writes as much in French as in English (all admirably translated) and his tone has changed too. In this volume, his editors note: “Beckett complains of no one but himself and of little but what he sees as his own inadequacies.”

These were the years of Beckett’s greatest achievements – Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, Texts for Nothing in prose, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and All That Fall in drama – and also of growing fame. While he shunned all personal publicity, he worked tirelessly, in the most businesslike way, to ensure that his writing be properly conveyed both by publishers and producers in the theatre.

The more expansive letters come relatively early in this period, such as those to the art critic Georges Duthuit, who espoused a modernist aesthetic even more anti-representational than that of Beckett himself. Among many theoretical elaborations, there are lovely passages of self-disclosure too.

In 1948, from Dublin, where he was staying with his mother, he writes: “The weather is fine, I walk along my old paths, I keep watching my mother’s eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood, that of old age. Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make. I think these are the first eyes that I have seen. I have no wish to see any others. I have all I need for loving and weeping.”

Then again in 1951, from Ussy, his country retreat, to Duthuit about a possible future there: “Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude, brightened up by gardening and walks, shorter and shorter.”

One of the incidental surprises of this volume is, in fact, its revelation of Beckett the gardener. He writes often about digging, tree-planting and weeding. “I know all about couch grass and the fearsome bindweed, and the way to get the dandelion with its root,” he boasts.

Some of the most informative letters are to strangers. To a German translator, Hans Naumann, he explains clearly his attitudes to Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Ireland: “Finally, it is utterly impossible for me to speak with moderation, I loathe that romanticism.” On his switch to writing in French, he offers “one clue: the need to be ill equipped”.

To a prisoner in Germany who had shown an interest in his work, Beckett writes an extraordinary letter of gratitude and identification: “In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark nor wholly silent.”

Though this scholarly edition is admirably edited on its own terms, it’s regrettable its remit was not wider. Samuel Beckett is one of those few, like Wittgenstein and Dr Johnson, about whom one wants to know everything one can. Still – let’s be thankful for what we have, a marvellous book.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941-1956

edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck

Cambridge University Press, 886pp, £30