The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 19411956 [ハードカバー]

What I remember most from the first volume of letters is how different Beckett was from my expectations. Travelling constantly, unable to publish much, reading voraciously in several languages and deeply concerned with painting. His insecurities and illnesses (or hypochondria) are so painfully described in that volume, and his passion for what he is reading and seeing is so exuberantly described that the letters shine. I simply loved the first volume and have reread parts of it over and over. So I was very excited to read the second volume.

I still give it a 5 star, and it still keeps to the rigorous standard of scholarship in its production, but Beckett himself I find less interesting, more expected. Let me start with the physical book and the editing. Cambridge Press uses a thicker paper for this volume, and that is a great improvement. Photos are also inserted into the pages where relevant instead of being clumped into a small section of small photos in the middle of the book. Again, a helpful improvement.

The multi-volume set of letters is being produced by a conglomerate of various institutions and academics. There are four editors! The result in the first volume was an absurd number of deeply anal footnotes that often swamped the letters themselves. There was no name or reference too well-known or obscure to escape a humorless note. This situation is somewhat improved in Volume 2 by omitting the well-known. This is explained by saying that "the editors can now assume that most readers will have access to the vast resources of the internet." Most? And they lacked that access when Volume 1 was published in 2009? Whatever, I'm glad we've been spared the obvious, but the notes are still less than fun to read. Beckett had a very hard time finding a publisher for Watt, and many letters discuss the frustration and logistics of finding a publisher. Yet obsessively each time this subject is raised we are treated to a footnote explaining the subject. That assumes the intended reader either suffers from extreme attention deficit disorder or the editors do not expect the reader to read the letters in order. Whichever, it is highly annoying. Also the footnotes provide not only an explanation but cite the source for the explanation making for long footnotes. It would have helped readability to add the sources as endnotes, though I realize this is merely a personal preference. But something needs to be done to further lessen the bulk of these leaden footnotes.

A last technical issue. As with the first volume the letters are included in the language in which they were written followed by an English language translation. By the time this volume starts Beckett is living in France with a woman whose first language is French, and the writer is writing his works in French, earning money for French-English translations. Thus a large minority of these letters, including those to Georges Duthuit, the most interesting of this volume, are written in French. The editors have taken the time to add references to footnotes in both the original and translation. I found myself reading the letter in the original referring to the translations for some words and to check the translations of the endless wordplay Beckett engages in, regardless of which language he uses.

Of the letters themselves? Beckett has settled down to life in Paris with a good portion of time spent in the French countryside. He is still interested in painting and can have very perceptive and unusual comments, but there isn't the compulsion to explain that is present in many of his Volume 1 comments on art and literature. That intensity is instead present in his description of nature, which interests me not at all. The facet that did interest me is translation in all the ways it appears in the book. Translations between languages. Beckett switched from writing his novels and plays in English to French and spends an increasing amount of time communicating with people hired to translate his works to other languages, including English. He works with transition magazine and others to translate works between French and English, and his plays are `translated' to the stage. His comments are thoughtful, sometimes grumpy, but always interesting. When asked why he now writes in French, among his explanations are "pour faire remarquer moi" and "le besoin d'etre malarme."

We learn that he doesn't mind someone making an all music (without words) adaptation of his play, but forbids adding music to a production explaining "I do not believe in collaboration between the arts." These and endless other examples provide wonderful insight to the world of Beckett's works, and in his wide ranging and almost hallucinatory letters to Georges Duthuit we see a much freer Beckett describing his world and his art.

I saw Godot recently, happened to have this second volume of letters, and mainly skimmed it for information about that and other plays. Really only two plays are mentioned much, they being the main ones he was working on in this period--Godot and a lesser amount about Endgame.

Actually, in relation to Godot, I wanted to learn more of what his experience had been during the war that might have been material for the play. But I found no letters at all dating from the years 1941-44. I guess when you are part of the underground resistance, you don't send off a lot of letters.

This second volume of letters "having bearing on my work" elegantly compiles Samuel Beckett's postwar correspondence. Limited as it is by his estate to literary contexts, nonetheless, with forty percent of his total letters published in over eight-hundred carefully edited pages, this 2011 title allows readers to follow Beckett as he matures. The often pleading, imploring frustration of a struggling Irishman trying to land a publisher for his poems and tales has faded. After his tense time working as a farmhand and for the French Resistance in the countryside, Beckett returns to Paris and then goes away to Ussy-sur-Marne to confront himself--and to create his breakthrough prose and drama.

As he had done in the first volume of his letters to Thomas McGreevy, so he opens up to Georges Duthuit from his new residence. Easing if not replacing the acerbic, dyspeptic tone of his youthful letters, he blends his unease into a mellower, if no less rueful, distillation of himself. He begins the sunset of the first day of June 1949 walking back to Ussy, accompanied or nagged along the road by mayflies. "In the end I worked out they were all accompanying me towards the Marne to be eaten by the fish, after making love on the water."

This remarkable vignette exemplifies the quality of his insights. Like the first volume (see my Feb. 2013 review), the second teems with artistic and philosophical interests. Yet, it diminishes the editorial apparatus that clogged parts of its predecessor: the Net is often assumed to suffice. You will need to refer all the same to vol. 1 for appended biographies of some of the key prewar correspondents, after the war, with whom Beckett continued to correspond.

A rare talent in both the novel and the play, Beckett's decision to enter into French as his primary mode of literary creation demonstrates his command of the idiom beyond his thirty years first in Ireland and then abroad. As the edition's French translator George Craig explains, Beckett made France his milieu.

Ireland recedes, where his older brother and his mother lingered before dying. In another moving passage, he writes to Duthuit in 1948 after he watches his fading mother's blue eyes. "Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make." Here you can discern the powerful mood which will grace or unsettle Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.

His visits back to Dublin appear to have caused less contention than those in the pre-war decade, yet he rankles at the censorship there and in London. When Godot was slated to appear on the West End in 1954, the Lord Chamberlain "got going." So, "coat" replaced "fly," "backside" replaced "arse," and "guts" replaced "privates."

Such asides speckle Beckett's writing, to one person in his letters, to the few but discerning readers of his increasingly confident fiction, or his sudden exposure with the fame that he had courted for so long with so little success. Waiting for Godot was advertised in Miami as "the laugh sensation of two continents." Socialites walked out in droves.

Dan Gunn introduces this collection by noting its "rhythm of approach and withdrawal." One wishes more had survived, and that the lacunae of the wartime years had been replaced with evidence of his life, but the silence speaks for his and bravery as an Irish citizen working against fascism and under the threat of death. Such commitment provided Beckett with more equanimity and compassion in the difficult years during and after the war as he reconstructed his own life and career in France.

Beckett comes to terms slowly with his celebrity, granted as he nears the age of fifty. Already sensing the diminution of his physical powers, ironically he enters into his literary prime in this second volume. He, who had urged so often others to read his works and to publish them, now begins to find himself elucidating or correcting others who seek out his advice.

Despite his French allegiance, he remains Irish. Craig as a fellow countryman senses the Irish-English persistence in Beckett's phrasing, and its pitch to the breath and spoken word rather than the semicolon or period. He castigates silly critics of Godot: "Like a lot of seaside brats digging for worms people are."

Within whichever language he chooses, Beckett finds himself agonizing over the right word, the key phrase. In the struggles documented here, he separates his voice in French, with its discipline and narrower range, from his native English, with its temptations to wander. Either way, this annotated and durable edition attests to his skill, his fluency, and his humanity.