I Send You Mine

Just shy of 800 pages, this instalment is the second of four that will still comprise only a selected edition, and it provides further evidence of Beckett’s remarkable capacity for correspondence. The letters published in this scrupulously annotated volume represent, we are told, only 40 per cent of those extant for the period. Many are in French – far more than in the first volume – though these are also accompanied by George Craig’s translations which often achieve an arrestingly Beckettian idiom. (A tiny but characteristic example: ‘si j’ai bien baffouillé’ becomes ‘if I have misexpressed myself aright’.)

Although the volume ostensibly covers the war years, there is in fact only one letter from the period between June 1940 and the end of the war, and that is a brief attempt to convey an ‘all well’ message to his family in Ireland. Beckett and his partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil had been forced to flee Paris in 1942 when the resistance cell for which he had worked as translator since 1941 was betrayed to the Gestapo. They had waited out the remainder of the war in the countryside of the Vaucluse, where Beckett had worked on a farm and written Watt, the novel that was to be his last major work in English for some years. (Rereading that difficult and extraordinary book, written in difficult and extraordinary circumstances, Beckett would later, in 1951, ‘establish, to my satisfaction, that I can make no sense of it any more’.)

The letters in this volume are chiefly of interest for what they reveal about the circumstances in which Beckett resumed his literary life in post-war Paris, after a brief stint as an ambulance driver in the town of Saint-Lô (‘a heap of rubble’). These are the years in which Beckett turned to French to compose the bulk of the work on which his reputation has since stood. With Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innommable (written 1947–50), together with the international success of En attendant Godot in 1953, when he was 47, he finally gained the recognition he had long sought. Thus at the beginning of the collection we find him complaining that everything he writes ‘goes out into the usual void’, but near the end he is ‘in the shit fontanelle-deep; rehearsals every day, translations on all sides, people to see – I can’t keep up’.

In line with the editorial remit to publish only those letters ‘having bearing on [the] work’, the volume focuses on Beckett’s burgeoning professional relationships – often very warm – with editors, publishers, translators, and directors. Obliquely, however, it does touch on more personal matters, including the death of his mother May in 1950, that of his brother Frank, after excruciating illness, in 1954, and an affair with an American woman, Pamela Mitchell, in 1953. Beckett’s lifelong partner Suzanne remains a somewhat shadowy presence in this volume. A handful of her letters to publishers on behalf of Beckett are included, but the editors’ introduction (which is both informative and sensitive) explains that none of Beckett’s letters to her are known to survive. When Beckett mentions her, it is often to report that she is unhappy, and it is tempting to see significance in the transition from the many letters which end with Beckett sending love ‘from us both’ to one in 1956 which concludes: ‘She sends you her love. And I send you mine.’

The most eye-catching (and ear-catching) part of the volume is undoubtedly the series of letters to the art critic and essayist Georges Duthuit, whom Beckett met in Paris in 1947. Duthuit – son-in-law to Matisse, no less – was post-war editor of Transition, a magazine to which Beckett contributed regularly. Like the Irishman Thomas MacGreevy in the pre-war period, whose friendship with Beckett seems to have waned during the 1940s, Duthuit became a particularly close confidant (‘a tankard with you, beneath any...