The Letters and Poems of Samuel

Beckett
By PAUL MULDOONDEC. 12, 2014
Photo

Samuel Beckett in West Berlin, where he directed "Endgame," September 1967. Credit Konrad
Giehr/dpa Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press

In a 1964 response to an inquiry from his Hungarian publisher, Europa Konyvkiado, Samuel
Beckett gives a handy thumbnail sketch not only of his career but of his character:

As a writer I have no feeling of any national attachment. I am an Irishman (Irish passport) living
in France for the past 27 years who has written part of his work in English and part in French.
The following plays were written in French:
En attendant Godot
Fin de Partie
Actes Sans Paroles I & II
and the following in English
Cascando
Krapps Last Tape
All That Fall
Embers
Words & Music
Happy Days
Play
If you should see fit to include one of the latter in your British anthology and one of the former in
your French I should be pleased. If this is not possible and a choice must be made, I should
prefer to figure in your French anthology.
While this isnt quite so pithy as Becketts retort to a French journalist on the question of his
being English (Au contraire), it does nonetheless give the gist of his contrarian, and often
contradictory, personality.
For much of Becketts work sets itself against something, be it turning up his nose at the selfdelighting verbal high jinks that he refers to as the stink of Joyce, or turning his back on the
conventions of the narrative arc and dramatic action. The letters collected here come in the
wake of the success, in 1955, of the English version of Waiting for Godot, the play in which,
according to the critic Vivian Mercier, nothing happens, twice. One of the few things that do
happen is that the tree thats barren in Act I develops some foliage in Act II. But, as the high
priest of lessness writes to the director Jerzy Kreczmar of the 1957 Warsaw production The
tree is perfect (perhaps a few leaves too many in the second act!) even that mustnt be
overstated.
The contradictory nature of Beckett is everywhere in evidence here. On one hand theres the
fastidiousness about the leaves too many. On the other is the fierce self-deprecation and
disengagement, whereby Watt is my regrettable novel, " Godot was written either between
Molloy and Malone or between Malone and LInnommable, I cant remember, and, about his
radio play Embers, Hate the sight of it in both languages.

This last occurs in a letter of Dec. 1, 1959, to Barbara Bray, the BBC drama producer who
oversaw the 1958 version of All That Fall, Becketts first radio play. The editing of this third
volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett is no less exemplary than that with which weve
come to be familiar from the first and second, but the entry on Bray in the Profiles section is a
masterpiece of tact and tacitness:
Few people can have come so close to SB. Lively, inventive and with a strong literary
sensibility, she was the ideal person to help him through his characteristic lack of confidence
about the new medium not least because she saw at once that it was perhaps, of all the
media, the one best suited to his gifts. SB was soon to feel totally at home with the BBC Sound
Drama team (the others at that time were Donald McWhinnie and John Morris), but his
connection with Bray, while unfailingly and productively professional, went well beyond that.

Why radio might be the medium best suited to Beckett comes down to a single concept
silence. No writer has understood the power of silence better than Beckett. No one has
understood better than Beckett that silence is not an absence of sound but a physical presence,
perhaps even a character. That certainly seems to be the case with Krapps Last Tape, the
monologue he wrote for Patrick Magee, which is the single greatest evocation of loss and
longing of the 20th century. (Becketts affection for Magee is one of the many heartwarming
discoveries of this volume.) Its no accident, so, that it was an icon of the silent era, Buster
Keaton, who would star in Becketts Film (1965), shot in some of the more dilapidated areas of
Lower Manhattan.
The slapstick humor we associate with much of Becketts work is rarely to be seen in the letters.
Knockabout gives way to nuance. For example, in 1959 he writes to Bray about his experience
of reading Doctor Zhivago, a copy of which she had given him as a present:
I have finished Pasternak with mixed feelings, which is more than I hoped for.
In 1958, meanwhile, hed written to Bray of the death of her estranged husband with what we
come to recognize as his trademark tenderness:
All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I
have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for
us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest.
Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, Ive been told) already they have
blown themselves out.
Its the phrase Ive been told that is the clincher here. It is wry in the face of wretchedness, sly
in the face of the onslaught, and it rather cleverly hints to a recent victim of viduity that someone
who might yet be capable of love may be waiting in the wings.
I use the word viduity because Krapp uses it to describe his mother dying after her long
viduity. One of the paradoxes we see again and again is that the Beckett who is so often
inclined to cut everything back to the bone, to avoid the excess he associates with Joyce, is
capable of the very linguistic derring-do he purports to hold in disdain. I think of him allowing

himself to pun on the phrase Emerald Isle with a very Joycean Haemorrhaldia. I think of him
referring to the rose grey nags of his new Citron 2CV (deux chevaux).
Such wordplay is, of course, much more associated with Becketts poems, going right the way
back to Whoroscope, written in 1930 for a competition run by the Hours Press and judged by
Richard Aldington and Nancy Cunard. He writes to Cunard in 1959:
Whoroscope was indeed entered for your competition and the prize of I think 1,000 francs. I
knew nothing about it till afternoon of last day of entry, wrote first half before dinner, had a
guzzle of salad and Chambertin at the Cochon de Lait, went back to the Ecole and finished it
about three in the morning. Then walked down to the Rue Gungaud and put it in your box.
Thats how it was and them were the days.
Whatever Whoroscope might smell of, its certainly not the lamp. Like so many of Becketts
poems, and unlike any of his prose or drama, it has a half-done quality. The main problem is
twofold. To begin with, Beckett has almost no sense of how a line functions in verse making. To
describe his line breaks as arbitrary would be a kindness. The second, related difficulty is that
he is fatally under the sway of his contemporaries in Irish modernism, notably Thomas
MacGreevy, who seem to understand the idea of representing fracture but without the
concomitant need for some sort of fusion and farrier-work. Opening The Collected Poems of
Samuel Beckett at random, one comes upon this:
My cherished chemist friend
lured me aloofly
down from the cornice
into the basement
drew bottles of acid and
alkali out of his breast
to a colourscale
accompaniment
(mad dumbells spare me!)
fiddling deft and expert
with the double jointed
nutcrackers of the hens
ovaries

Mad dumbells spare me indeed! I think its fair to say that were Becketts name not hovering
around in its vicinity, this poem would not be published by Grove Press or anyone else. The idea
that this edition might include previously unpublished material begins to seem more of a threat
than a promise! Becketts self-disparaging 1957 letter to Eva Hesse on her translation of his
poems into German (You have my heartfelt sympathy) is not at all misplaced. Writing in 1957
to Grove Presss Barney Rosset about the idea of publishing his poems, Beckett speaks better
than he knows:
I have lost many and not all are worth reprinting. There is one wild love one called Cascando
you might like. An American bitch.
Leaving aside the tone of this last sentence, which is so out of tune in its boys-will-be-boys
crudity with the rest of the letters, a quick read of Cascando will reveal the following:
the churn of stale words in
the heart again
love love love thud of the old
plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
Again, this is truly dreadful stuff. Why go to the effort of establishing the metaphorical system of
churning butter and then appeal to the quite different system of pestling? Its the kind of failure
of nerve to which Beckett rarely succumbed in his other work.
This Cascando of 1936 is not to be confused, for example, with the Cascando of 1964, the
English version of a radio play originally written in French. Starring Denys Hawthorne and
Patrick Magee and produced by Donald McWhinnie, Cascando was broadcast on Oct. 6. On
or about that day, Beckett wrote to Peter Hall of the Royal Shakespeare Company that a
season of my work at the Aldwych would of course give me great pleasure. By Oct. 20, 1964,
the Beckett who was capable of such enthusiasm was just as capable of writing to Barney
Rosset to ask for the presses to be stopped:
I have broken down halfway through galleys of More Pricks Than Kicks. I simply cant bear it. It
was a ghastly mistake on my part to imagine, not having looked at it for a quarter of a century,
that this old [expletive] was revivable. Im terribly sorry, but I simply have to ask you to stop
production.
This enduring, endearing self-doubt is a mark of most great writers. For some, it may seem like
a pose. Not for Beckett. Again and again, this volume of letters allows Beckett to come off as
being genuinely assured of his vision of, say, how a part should be interpreted (describing one
recalcitrant actor as another Beckett specialist), while being genuinely uncertain about his own
role. Writing to the translator Arland Ussher in 1962 about Usshers musings on Beckettism, he
asserts:

My unique relation and it a tenuous one is the making relation. I am with it a little in the
dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it
myself and it seems a stranger in the light that others throw.
On Jan. 8, 1958, Beckett had complained to Rosset that the director Alan Schneider planned to
draw on their correspondence for an article in The New York Times:
I am disturbed by the letter montage. . . . I dislike the ventilation of private documents. These
throw no light on my work.
The following day, however, Beckett wrote to Schneider himself:
Your letter of Jan. 5 today. Shall answer it properly (?) tomorrow or this evening. This in haste to
get something off my muckheap of a mind. I received from Barney yesterday jacket of book and
extracts from our letters, with no indication of what the latter was for. This disturbed me as I do
not like publication of letters. I wrote to him at once saying I shd prefer the letters not to be used
unless it was important for you that they should be. I see from your letter that it is and this is
simply to say all right, go ahead. . . . Thanks for the photos, they do me full justice.
One may be in no doubt that, even on a bad day, even on a day when all his ironies are to the
fore, Beckett would have concluded that this magnificent project does him just that.

THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Volume III: 1957-1965
Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck
Illustrated. 771 pp. Cambridge University Press. $50.

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

A Critical Edition
Edited by Sean Lawlor and John Pilling
499 pp. Grove Press. $35.