The Letters of Samuel Beckett

Abstract

Just shy of 800 pages, this instalment is the second of four that will still comprise only a selected edition, and it provides further evidence of Beckett's remarkable capacity for correspondence. The letters published in this scrupulously annotated volume represent, we are told, only 40 per cent of those extant for the period. Many are in French – far more than in the first volume – though these are also accompanied by George Craig's translations which often achieve an arrestingly Beckettian idiom. (A tiny but characteristic example: ‘si j'ai bien baffouillé’ becomes ‘if I have misexpressed myself aright’.) Although the volume ostensibly covers the war years, there is in fact only one letter from the period between June 1940 and the end of the war, and that is a brief attempt to convey an ‘all well’ message to his family in Ireland. Beckett and his partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil had been forced to flee Paris in 1942 when the resistance cell for which he had worked as translator since 1941 was betrayed to the Gestapo. They had waited out the remainder of the war in the countryside of the Vaucluse, where Beckett had worked on a farm and written Watt, the novel that was to be his last major work in English for some years. (Rereading that difficult and extraordinary book, written in difficult and extraordinary circumstances, Beckett would later, in 1951, ‘establish, to my satisfaction, that I can make no sense of it any more’.)