LETTERS: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck Cambridge University Press, 782pp, £30
IF SAMUEL BECKETT had died at the point where this volume ends, in June 1940 as France fell to the Germans, what work of his would we remember? Dante and the Lobster,the one perfect story in the otherwise erratic collection, More Pricks than Kicks(1934); a handful of inturned lyrics in the slim volume Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates(1935); Murphy(1938), that very funny, erudite, wayward first published novel.
What this selection of letters reveals is not the great writer to come but an extraordinarily brilliant, tormentedly self-conscious and unhappy young man with a compelling urge to write.
Beckett knew too much and felt too much about what he knew. This is someone who read as voraciously in French, Italian and German as he did in English, philosophy as readily as literature.
We find him immersed in the 11-volume collected works of Kant ordered from Germany or pleasurably revisiting Schopenhauer, “a philosopher that can be read like a poet”. He was just as passionately engaged with the visual arts and music as he was with the written word. (Significantly, the letters show much less interest in theatre at this stage: “Balbus building his wall would be more dramatic” than two Yeats plays seen at the Abbey.)
When in Dublin, he haunted the National Gallery, evaluating each new acquisition, complaining of the disastrous re-hanging of his favoured Dutch painters or of the overcleaning of a Perugino. The long cold winter of 1936 to 1937 was spent touring the museums of Germany, where many of the best avant-garde paintings classified by the Nazis as “degenerate” had to be sought out in cellars and private collections.
In music as in painting, he was contemptuous of the conventionally admired: Eugen Jochum conducting in Berlin "is the kind of conductor one feels must have begun on a bus or a tram"; Beethoven's Pastoral Symphonyis "an insult to the ear and understanding".
For someone so intellectually and artistically overdeveloped, simplicity and directness came hard. As he put it at the start of a long letter to Nuala Costello, “It’s a great handicap to me in all my anabases and stases that I can’t express myself in a straightforward manner.” Indeed. The statement neatly illustrates what it states; the Greek loan words for “goings out” and “staying still” are among the few not glossed by the diligent editors.
Written in allusive, elliptical and contorted prose, these are not easy letters to read. Only in the deeply moving letter to Thomas McGreevy giving the news of the death of his father does the language come out purged of all display: “I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.”
The letters to McGreevy provide the bulk of this volume, McGreevy whom he met at the École Normale in Paris and who shared so many of his tastes as poet, writer and art connoisseur. While the very few letters to Joyce begin formally “Dear Mr Joyce” (and there are none to his other admired exemplar of the time Jack B Yeats) to McGreevy he poured out his feelings with a warmth signalled in the valedictions, “God love thee” or simply “Love Sam”.
It is in one such letter in March 1935 that he makes the most revealing autobiographical statement: “For years I was unhappy, consciously deliberately ever since I left school went to TCD, so that I isolated myself more and more, undertook less less lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid . . . It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself.”
It was this that drove him to the psychoanalysis he was undergoing at the time, and which allowed him to see both mental attitude and bodily manifestations as equally psychopathological.
This interconnected malaise of mind and body surfaces in the letters in an insistent obscenity and scatology, particularly in relation to his own writing.
Language is again and again seen as some sort of physical excretion. He apologises at one point for what he calls his "verbal sanies" (sanies meaning morbid discharge). A poem may be an onanistic "occasion of wordshed"; poems accepted for publication are dismissed as "three turds from my central lavatory". Frustrated by a publisher's demands for cuts to the text of Murphy, he declares to Mary Manning that "my next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots".
Like any writer, Beckett was desperately in need of praise and publication, but at the same time in nauseated recoil from his own writing.
Just once in the nearly 700 pages of these letters do we catch a glimpse of the opposite, the pure pleasure of creative inspiration, “the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes, that is the best of all experiences”.
Miserable in Dublin, miserable in Paris, in London and in Germany for so much of the 1930s, with the return to Paris in 1937 that was to prove permanent, there came a change: “the relief of being back here. Like coming out of gaol in April.”
It was a change others noticed in him too; by 1940, according to Joyce’s friend Maria Jolas, he was “vastly improved and was extremely agreeable and nice about everything”. And, though there is very little indication of it in the letters, which are notably discreet about his love life throughout, he had by then come together with the woman who was to be his lifelong companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil.
This first of a promised four volumes (to include 2,500 out of a total 15,000 items of correspondence) represents already a heroic achievement by the editors who embarked on the project nearly a quarter of a century ago.
A general introduction gives details of the enormous labour involved in collection and selection, the delays caused by difficult negotiations with the Beckett estate after the writer’s death; an illuminating introduction specifically to this volume makes a compelling case for his letters as significant acts of writing, “performances” rather than communications.
Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, with their associate editors George Craig and Dan Gunn, tell us that their policy on annotation has tended to the "minimalist" model of Ellman's edition of Joyce's letters rather than the maximalist policy of the Oxford Collected Letters of W B Yeats.
Nonetheless, each letter has demanded a dense undergrowth of notes in minuscule print, providing information on every allusion, every reference, even acknowledging where such information has been sought but not found. (One unidentified person who shows up in response to a letter from Mary Manning – “I don’t know Grene” – was almost certainly an uncle of this reviewer.)
The editorial team deserves all our thanks for their patience, their stamina and their scholarly rigour. Tom Stoppard is quoted on the back cover saying “one must hope to stay alive until the fourth volume is safely delivered”. Agreed – we must wait on for the later, greater Beckett.
Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin. His edition of Synge’stravel writings, Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908will be published by Lilliput Press this month