BOOK REVIEW: What the Beckett letters show

THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT: 1929-1940

Edited by Martha Dow Felsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck

Cambridge University Press, $50, 782 pages, illus.

Reviewed by Martin Rubin

Some writers have a recognizable physical image that readers associate with their oeuvre. None more so than the ravaged, wasted, gaunt figure of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) that goes so well with the bleak world of his plays, notably his best-known one, “Waiting for Godot.”

But the photographic image on the front cover of this first volume of his collected letters (starting when he was in his early 20s and ending in his mid-30s) is quite different from that iconic one. Here we have a handsome, introspective, grave, expectant young man, radiating sensitivity and intelligence - the person we encounter in this dense, revealing collection of letters, which is very much Beckett’s own self-portrait of the artist as a young man.

“I find it more & more difficult to write, even letters to my friends,” Beckett wrote in 1936, midway through this volume.

You would never know it from the natural grace and ease of these missives, which more than validate the editors’ statement in the introduction to this volume that Beckett “was one of the great literary correspondents of the twentieth century, perhaps of any century.”

His editors have done him justice by providing the fullest context imaginable, backed up by their impressive scholarship. To say this book is fully annotated would be an understatement: At times, the notes to a particular letter are much longer than its text.

But far from being off-putting, all this annotation is not only superbly satisfying and helpful to the reader but fascinating in itself. As are the profiles, notes and other scholarly material contained in this volume. All in all, they provide not only a wealth of insight into Beckett but also a rounded account of the milieus in which he lived and worked.

What jumps out more than anything else about Beckett from these letters is how cosmopolitan he was. An aunt to whom he was close was married to an Irish Jew and lived with her family in Germany until the Nazis made that uncomfortable; he visited them and wrote some interesting letters from there.

His degree from Trinity College Dublin was a distinguished one in French and Italian language and literature. Not only did he speak those languages superbly (as well as a native, according to the testimonials included here from some of his professors) but he also was fluent in German. This was when he had barely been out of his native Ireland except for some short stays.

Indeed, 30 percent of these letters are written in French and 5 percent in German, both excellent and colloquial, of course - and, as you might expect in an edition like this, beautifully translated into English by expert scholars, each of whom provides an introduction about his or her translations.

Before he went to live in France in the late 1930s and long before the 1950s, when he wrote “En attendant Godot” (“Waiting for Godot”) and those novels in French that are so esteemed by scholars, “Molloy,” “Malone Meurt” and “L’Innomable,” you can see from these letters how determined he was never to be insular, in art or in life.

These letters show a humanity in Beckett that is very attractive and certainly adds force to the argument that the bleak world depicted in his plays represents not a dehumanized place, but rather one where all of life has been distilled into its essences. As a correspondent, he is warm, confessional and open about his emotions. There are fascinating glimpses of James Joyce, whom he assisted in the almost impossible task of translating into French the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” sequences of “Finnegan’s Wake.”

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