Beckett after the hostilities

LETTERS: NICHOLAS GRENEreviews The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck Cambridge University Press, 791pp. £30

HERE IT IS: just two years after the first volume, the second instalment of what promises to be one of the great productions of literary scholarship of our time, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. It is edited by the same highly dedicated team as before, only now with George Craig and Dan Gunn advanced from associate to full editors with the pioneering Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. And this is the volume we have been waiting for, covering as it does the period when Beckett produced most of his greatest work.

In spite of the start date of 1941, no letters survive from the war period, and the correspondence begins in January 1945 as Beckett returned to Paris from his exile in Rousillon, in unoccupied France. It was in the following year that he began to write his prose fiction in French, having had no luck in finding a publisher for Watt, which he had written in English during the war. From 1947 to 1950 there was the astonishing prolific period in which he wrote his first play, Eleutheria, the novels Molloy(in six months) and Malone Dies(five months) and the play Waiting for Godot(three months) before slowing down a little with the extraordinarily dense novel The Unnamable, which took him 10 months to complete.

Publication and recognition of these works came slowly. Beckett’s companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil hawked the novels to publishers and the plays to theatre producers while Beckett survived on scraps of translation work. A crucial breakthrough came with the commitment of Jérôme Lindon to publish the three novels in his Éditions de Minuit. For Lindon, still only 25, it was a brave and, as it turned out, inspired decision, and in letter after letter Beckett acknowledged his gratitude for the faith the publisher showed in him.

The appearance of the novels made a real mark in French literary circles, attracting serious and respectful reviews. But it was not until the much deferred production of En Attendant Godotin January 1953 – after one delay Beckett writes, with wry wit, "Let's wait for Godot, but not tomorrow" – that his international reputation so unexpectedly took off. Yet, ironically, this success came in a prolonged dry period for him. From 1950 to 1954 he produced nothing but the fragmentary Texts for Nothing. It was only with great difficulty that he got going again with what was to become Endgame, written in French in 1955, and All That Fall, his first radio play, commissioned for the BBC in 1956.

The switch to French was clearly one factor in the surge in productivity. To a correspondent who asked about the motives behind the change, Beckett offered only one cryptic clue: "the need to be ill-equipped" (" le besoin d'être mal armé").

We cannot take this too literally. The polyglot Beckett was armed to the teeth in French as in several other languages. In the course of the letters we find him making elaborate cross-linguistic puns, correcting mistakes in a German translation of Molloyand commenting on the accuracy or otherwise of Spanish and Italian versions of Godot. George Craig, in his brilliant translator's preface to this volume, illustrates the complex playfulness of style in Beckett's many letters in French. But he picks out also a telling sentence in Beckett's explanation about why he had to act as self-translator. For all that his English was rusty by 1955, "I simply happen to be able still to write the queer kind of English that my queer French deserves." Estranging oddity is the aim in both languages.

Until his mother died, in 1950, Beckett spent at least a month of every postwar summer in Ireland, and he devotedly nursed his brother, Frank, through his long last illness, in 1954. His letters to his old Irish friends HO White, Con Leventhal and Thomas MacGreevy are warmly affectionate. But he found returns to Ireland extremely difficult. And he deprecated any suggestion that he was a part of a tradition of Irish writing. “On Ireland,” he wrote, “it is utterly impossible for me to speak with moderation. I loathe that romanticism.”

He went as often as possible to his bleak little house in Ussy-sur-Marne, 50km outside Paris. There, as Dan Gunn suggests in his fine introduction to this volume, “the surprises offered by nature seemed to offer relief from the burden of selfhood”. Indeed the unexpected passages of natural observation are one of the joys of reading these letters. Yet often what Ussy offered was merely the temporary self-forgetfulness of work in the garden: “I am writing a little and gardening a little. Tomorrow I shall sow some spinach and bed out leeks. I am gathering greengages to make our own eau-de-vie. Moments of calm, moments of near-panic.”

Beckett was notoriously reluctant to talk about his own work and would not give press interviews. One of the few disappointments of this volume, in fact, is how little he has to say about works in progress; we virtually only hear of the novels or of Godotas current tasks begun or completed. But there is compensation for this lacuna in the extraordinary outpourings of his long letters to the art critic Georges Duthuit about the painting of their mutual friend Bram van Velde. It is here that Beckett speaks most tellingly – and rhetorically – about what is evidently his own aesthetic of impotence and absence. As he says apologetically at the end of one of these letters: "I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else."

Beckett's stonewalling of the ever-increasing demands for explication of Godotcould also be revealing. In an extremely important letter to Carlheinz Caspari, a German director of the play, he denied symbolic intentions: "First and foremost, it is a question of something that happens, almost a routine, and it is this dailiness and this materiality, in my view, that needs to be brought out . . .

“Godot,” he went on to insist, “is not of a different species from those he cannot or will not help. I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed.”

As productions of Godotproliferated, the story had its bizarre moments. Negotiations for the English-language premiere, in London, ran into trouble with the lord chamberlain's office. Offended by the play's onstage farting, it decreed that "no reference to the breaking of wind" be allowed. In 1953, the year of the play's first French performance, there was already a German production staged in Lüttringhausen prison, and Beckett wrote a deeply moved and moving letter to the prisoner responsible.

An American production was mooted, starring Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando. Cyril Cusack wanted to stage a dual-language version set in Connemara, with Vladimir and Estragon speaking Irish between themselves and English with the anglophone Pozzo and Lucky. Though Beckett was bewildered by this bilingual plan, he liked the fact that the whole text was eventually translated into Irish by Liam Ó Briain.

He would not, however, have been pleased, had he seen it, by the Pike Theatre version of the play that was such a hit in Dublin. Its director, Alan Simpson, confessed to “having made minor improvements to the text”. In fact, he virtually rewrote the whole play into Hiberno-English dialect. Beckett, who tolerated no “unauthorised deviations” from his script, would surely have been horrified if he had seen the Pike prompt-book now in the library of Trinity College Dublin.

There is in this volume, Gunn tells us, “a new absence of hostility and recrimination, a lack of grievance towards the world and its inhabitants”. That is true, and it is one of the reasons why this book is so much more enjoyable to read than the first volume.

The letters show us an admirable human being, punctiliously polite to colleagues and professional associates, warm and loving to friends, brilliantly expressive in artistic debate. Below all this, however, is the subterranean self in which he felt constantly imprisoned, from which no amount of ordinary human interaction or extraordinary recognition could afford him liberation. For such deep-seated personal unhappiness, Beckett could offer no explanation: “As for saying who I am, where I come from and what I am doing, all that is quite beyond me.”

This magnificent volume of letters, so painstakingly prepared by the editors, takes us a bit closer to answering those questions. For the only truly significant answers we must turn back to the amazingly powerful and beautiful works themselves.

Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin. His childhood memoir, Nothing Quite Like It, is published by Somerville Press