Man of words

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge University Press; 886 pages; $50 and £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

SAMUEL BECKETT is not known for being amusing. The Irish playwright cut a gaunt, Giacometti-like figure when walking along the Seine in his adopted Paris that, with the passing years, grew too busy for his liking. His work can seem similarly stark, resting on the bleak vision of his best-known play “Waiting for Godot”. Beckett's world is composed of characters buried up to their necks in earth, stuck in urns or legless in bins. It is one in which it seems, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!”

On first glance, the second volume of Beckett's letters does little to dispel this nihilistic image. Covering 1941 to 1956 (with the first letter dated only from 1945), this volume charts the most important and traumatic years of Beckett's life. Understandably but regrettably, there are no letters from the war years, when Beckett was on the run with Suzanne Deschevaux- Dumesnil, his future wife. Hiding in Roussillon and working as part of the British Special Operations Executive for the French Resistance unit, “Gloria SMH”, Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his war effort. Characteristically, he never spoke of these years or his bravery in his letters. But this time, and Beckett's relative silence on it, forms the backdrop to his work. It is hard not to see in the figure of Pozzo with his slave, Lucky, in “Waiting for Godot” a reflection of the cruelty that caused the death, among others, of Beckett's friend and fellow Resistance member, Alfred Péron, who was interned in Mauthausen. Those are the years that can be heard when Vladimir says, as he waits for Godot, “You'd make me laugh, if it wasn't prohibited.”

This volume then begins straight after the war, when Beckett and Deschevaux-Dumesnil move back to Paris and back to a life where Beckett's work could be rejected for being “wild and unintelligible” and where he was still considering the possibility that “any experience of trade journalism would be so useful.” Happily, though, this piecemeal existence did not last for long. By 1953, Beckett was writing to one of his many lovers, Pamela Mitchell, who worked for a theatre producer named Harold Oram and was in Paris to negotiate the rights for the American premiere of “Waiting for Godot”. In a letter about a new production, he told Mitchell, “Well played, but how I dislike that play now. Full house every night, it's a disease.”

It was to be a disease that lasted for the rest of Beckett's life. Many of the letters in this volume are to his publisher, Jérôme Lindon, as Beckett refuses interviews, awards, and offers to join the Irish Academy of Letters; rejecting both the fame “Waiting for Godot” brought and Ireland with equal measure. Like the letters to his co-translators, Beckett's correspondence with Lindon shows his scrupulous attention to detail in his work—nothing was unimportant in a world so sparse, and so brilliantly composed.

Such letters hold but marginal interest, however, when compared with those directed at two specific people: Georges Duthuit, an art historian with whom Beckett corresponded intensely about painting from 1948 to 1952, and Mitchell. With Duthuit Beckett let himself relax, ostensibly writing about other people's work at the same time as confessing that “I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” Such an admission contrasts with what became Beckett's party line: “I have no ideas about theatre. I know nothing about it. I do not go to it.”

Likewise, to Mitchell his guard drops, and a warmer side appears. It is to her that Beckett's humour—there in his plays, under it all—finally surfaces, even if it is a certain type of misanthropic comedy: “I've been reading in your grand Baudelaire and the Holy Bible the story of the Flood and wishing the Almighty had never had a soft spot for Noah.”

It is a fault of this volume that this side of Beckett is not more widely seen. Shortly before his death, Beckett stipulated that his published letters should “have bearing on my work.” Interpreting this literally, the careful editors of this volume halve a letter to Mitchell, and exclude others. In doing so, they forget that the life of a man has as much bearing on his work as his own thoughts on it. Indeed, it is Beckett's life that led him to write that “fucking play”, and which tells us better than any criticism can how he managed to do so.