The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume I, 1929–1940 (review)

As a young man, Samuel Beckett was a skilled speaker of four modern languages, a connoisseur of painting and music, and an omnivorous reader. "Kant, Descartes, Johnson, Renard, and a kindergarten manual of science" (634) were a few of his selections for September of 1938, and the rest of his self-imposed curriculum—Ariosto, Balzac, Melville, and the toughest of the modernists—was no less diverse. In other words, he had an education of a kind that, today, is increasingly uncommon—the kind of education that might nourish an attribute uncommon in any era, artistic genius. As a writer, though, Beckett's development was not meteoric. Actually, it was quite the contrary, in spite of the flashes of imaginative power that the early works exhibit. There is some sharp Chaplinesque humor in the unpublished novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but it all appears to be spackled with self-indulgent witticism. Similarly, some of the scenes and stories in More Pricks than Kicks (1934) show Beckett honing a talent for morbidity. Others riff too much on James Joyce. Others, including a few with great comic potential, simply misfire. There are Beckett's poems, which at their best evince an eye for detail (the "black west / throttled with clouds" of "Enueg I"), and at their regular worst read like the honorable mentions in a Bad T. S. Eliot contest. And then, there is Murphy, the not-quite-great but deeply entertaining novel that Beckett published in 1938—a novel that sends up several literary commonplaces, yet contains genuinely beautiful if heavily-worked writing. A novel that, wonderful as it can be, is still too precocious to be really satisfying.

So it was that I opened the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett expecting that I had set myself a 882-page chore—or, at least, that I would have to spend a lot of time sifting through inchoate ideas and sheer verbiage, hoping to hear whispers of brilliance. Such whispers can be found, although they don't compensate for certain tendencies that are hellishly irritating. As in the fiction, there are times in the Letters when Beckett's smartness sours into a hyper-modernistic gamesmanship that doesn't age well, and that isn't all that complex once an irony or two have been hashed out. "It's a great handicap to me in all my anabases and stases that I can't express myself in a straightforward manner" (184), remarks Beckett in a 1934 letter to Nuala Costello, before going on to declare that "not for doing, I find in my Dante, but for not doing, is Virgil in limbo, though honoured above the deadborn that are there, and above the throngs of men and women who exercised all the virtues at top pressure save only the theological group with which they were not familiar that are there also, with a roving commission as far as the purgatorial Eden, where he withdraws and the ladies take over" (185). We get the point. Yet, the whisper is there. Years later, in the novel Malone Dies, Beckett would deploy such grandiloquence and random erudition in crafting one of his funniest narrative voices, and one, ironically, of his darkest narratives. Even as Volume I itself progresses, the traits that can be so grating in the earlier letters—including some unoriginal bodily humor ("I'll evacuate a poem for you one of these dies diarrohoeae" [124], "Shatton and Windup" for the publishing house Chatto and Windus [125])—are almost refined out of existence. Maybe, even as a correspondent, Beckett needed to pass through a period of flippancy on his way to a more trenchant though equally energetic style.

And herein lies the real allure of Beckett's early exchanges. To read these documents is to witness an extremely powerful, unevenly disciplined mind in the process of self-realization. This does not necessarily mean that the letters...