The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, 1941-1956 (review)

According to its editors, Volume II of The Letters of Samuel Beckett is the product of a much mellower writerly sensibility than its predecessor. Gone, for the most part, are the passages of rambunctious, clotted, over-erudite prose that flared up in Volume I; almost gone is the younger, pre-WWII Beckett's revelry in scatological humor; and almost gone are the kind of stingingly smart epigrams that, in the early letters, Beckett fired at everyone from D.H. Lawrence to T.S. Eliot to Gertrude Stein. In the words of the "Introduction to Volume II," Beckett's post-War missives are "informative and direct rather than exploratory and complex," the writings of a man "more settled and more concentrated, 'a sadder and a wiser man' perhaps, even when no more satisfied with his own literary endeavors." Of course, he is still capable of extreme dissatisfaction with the literary endeavors of others. Even though the main events of these years are, first, Beckett's metamorphosis from Anglophone novelist to Francophone playwright and, second, Beckett's transformation from obscure Irish expatriate to international celebrity, his quibbles with editors (including Simone de Beauvoir at Les Temps Modernes, of all people) make an excellent sideshow. Yet I can't help thinking that Beckett's quarrelsome, almost self-satirizing attention to detail explains his Proustian ability to use small observations, throwaway comments, to plunge his readers into an entire cosmos of thought, speculation, implication. Asked about the inspirations for the characters in Waiting for Godot, Beckett told one correspondent that "I know no more of the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them. Of their appearance, I have indicated the little I have been able to make out. The Bowler hats, for example." Just as these remarks seem to hold forth an entire logic of composition, Beckett's 1954 remarks on his exposure to Kafka gesture toward something like an entire theory of influence and response: "I felt at home, too much so—perhaps that is what kept me from reading on. Case closed then and there."

However, Beckett's best epistolary tendencies always have anemic undersides. Although Volume I features some spectacularly irritating paragraphs, such passages are the product of the same love of verbal and intellectual performance that lies behind the moments of passion, perceptiveness, and blistering insight that marked Beckett's early correspondence. The letters in this new grouping are seldom irritating. The worst I can typically say of them, entry-by-entry, is that they can be rather dull, and I'm not talking about the kind of dullness that you'll find in Beckett's novel Watt—a dullness of accumulated and absurdly precise and bizarrely endearing particulars, an atmosphere of tedium that proves as infectiously memorable as a first-rate sestina. No, this is dullness in a much simpler sense. The volume is loaded with business messages, which at first promise an absorbing close-up view of Beckett's publishing history. After 500 pages or so, these exchanges induce something between myopia and ennui. (Can anyone, even a Beckettiana devotee, be excited to examine English translations of the French letters that Beckett's partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, wrote to publishers on his behalf? Anyone?) The larger problem, though, is that Beckett's "informative and direct" style leaves too much unsaid too often, without often enough achieving the velocity, the density, of his remarks on Godot and Kafka. In the years that Volume II spans, Beckett would arrive at the aesthetic of terrifying emptinesses and tragicomic outbursts that would propel him through the rest of his career. Yet these letters frequently read like irascible updates (February 2, 1956: "I do not like the places the new play is taking me now."), with further updates (February 22: "Have finished the play to my great dissatisfaction, especially with Act 1."), and further updates (July 26: "Finishing the...