'LET THEM remain private", Vladimir tells Estragon in Waiting for Godotwhen the former brings up the subject of his nightmares. The letters of Samuel Beckett were never going to remain private and like the correspondence of so many great writers – Philip Larkin is another notable recent example – they often reveal as much, or more, about their author as the work that established their reputations.
In both English and French, Beckett was an inveterate letter-writer – an estimated 1,500 items of correspondence are known to exist. The first volume of his letters added further testament, as if one were needed, to his literary genius and their publication was greeted as "an elating cultural moment". Now the second volume – six of these letters appear exclusively in this newspaper today – is about to appear. The occasion marks one of the great literary correspondences of the last century. It is clear that the epistle, as much as the play or novel, was very much his forte. The years they cover, 1941-1956, were some of his most productive – Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies, Endgame– and both the personality and artistic process we might think we know from these works is further illuminated.
The Beckett of these letters is self-deprecating and frequently surprising. Without these letters we would never have known that literature and the stage almost lost him to a career with RGDATA (Retail Grocery Dairy and Allied Trades Association) Review. The £300 annual salary must have been tempting to a struggling scribe back in 1946. It is evident too that through friends in the city where he imagined he was "very poorly thought of", he was keeping close tabs on the Pike theatre's Irish premiere of Godot.
The prose is often as magnificent as in the novels and plays. There are many glimpses of a deeply affectionate, tender, humane, considerate and humorous man, especially in the letters to old friends in Dublin. There is, alas, nothing from his period with the French Resistance and what must have been formative and indelible experiences in the second World War. It may seem odd that a writer of such legendary reticence, who refused to attend the presentation of his own Nobel Prize, was so forthcoming and willing to speak his mind.
It is hard to imagine the richness of language and thought to be found in these letters, in future editions of literary correspondence from our own era of e-mails and text messages.