The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940

Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck Cambridge University Press, €35

It is hard to credit the magisterial scholarship and publishing expertise that has gone into the editing of this first of four volumes of the letters of Samuel Beckett. Reading the 780 pages is like rediscovering Beckett the man in high definition and hearing in full stereo the emerging voice that would, quite literally, transform the world of literature and theatre in the last half of the 20th century. There is a school of thought which sees the publication of a writer’s letters as a gross intrusion on his or her inner world.

Seeing as he was obsessively preoccupied with privacy and the compulsions of an isolated ‘soulscape’, it seems that, of all the great modern writers, Beckett is the last whose private correspondence should be exposed to public light.

Far from it. Beckett himself - and then through the fosterage of his estate -made this project possible. Furthermore, its two editors, Marthe Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, along with their associate editors, George Craig and Dan Gunn - and what looks like the entire global academic, literary and library community in Beckett studies - have produced a breathtaking and essential work of human understanding. We begin on March 23, 1929, as the 20-something Beckett writes a brief note (one of only three in the collection) to James Joyce on his (Beckett’s) article on Joyce’s work in progress, Finnegans Wake: ‘‘Will you remember me to Mrs Joyce and Giorgio & Lucia. Sincerely yours, Sam Beckett.”

The volume ends more than ten years later on June 10,1940, when an older and wiser Beckett writes a note in French to Marthe Arnaud, a former Protestant missionary in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) and companion of Beckett’s friend, painter Bran Van Velde: ‘‘I shall be at the Cafe¤ des Sports on Friday at 4.Why don’t you come and watch the game? All this provided that we are staying on in Paris. Suzanne [Beckett’s lifetime partner] seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?”

While the notes to this final letter don’t tell us what the game was, they do reveal that, on ‘‘the day of the proposed meeting, 14 June 1940, Paris was occupied by the Germans. SB and Suzanne left Paris for Vicky on 12 June . . . continued first to Toulouse . . . finally to Arcachon on the Atlantic where they were assisted by Mary Reynolds . . . and Marcel Duchamp’’, at which point, as Europe is pitched into the mayhem of World War II, Beckett and Suzanne are left on the edge of things, with volume two beckoning and the reconnection with Beckett’s story in the aftermath of 1945.

Reading this collection, one is continually amazed by Beckett’s mind - his phenomenal reading, the range of his learning across many languages and the intensity of his young life in Trinity College and in the wider reaches of Dublin social and literary life, of which he was a constantly strained and disaffected observer.

But also of his friendships; from school and college days, his friends remained close and abiding supports. None more so than the lamentably neglected poet and critic, Thomas MacGreevy, clearly Beckett’s dearest confidant. The Letters is MacGreevy’s book as much as it is Beckett’s - and George Reavey’s, the other key figure in Beckett’s writing life during the 1930s.

Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the Letters reveals an as yet unwritten social history of Irish and European literature: the Beckett Era, populated, for instance, by many wonderful, exotic women, such as Hester Dowden, the clairvoyant, pianist daughter of former TCD professor of English Edward Dowden, whose life story is the stuff of drama; Nancy Cunard, the doyen of transatlantic avant-garde; and the fascinating Nuala Costello from Tuam, whom Beckett first met in the home of Joyce’s son, Giorgio.

He writes to MacGreevy: ‘‘Miss Costello said to me, ‘You haven’t a good word to say for anyone but the failures’. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time.”

But if one letter beyond all others stands out in this glorious book, it is the following shock of 1933. In April: ‘‘Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveler. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under colour [cover?] of admiring the view. I’ll never have any one like him.”

In May, Beckett lost his adored Jewish cousin, Peggy Sinclair, who died of tuberculosis in Germany and, on July 2, he opens his letter to ‘‘my dear Tom’’.

‘‘Father died last Monday afternoon after an illness lasting just under a week and was buried the following Wednesday morning in a little cemetery on the Greystones side of Bray Head, between the mountains and the sea . . . His last words were ‘Fight fight fight’ and ‘what a morning’. All the little things come back . . . I can’t write about him. I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.” This is a great book; simply priceless.

Gerald Dawe’s most recent poetry collection, Points West, was published last year by Gallery Press. A Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, he is the current Heimbold Visiting Professor at Villanova University, Philadelphia