Beckett

“How I dislike that play now . . .”

Alan Jenkins

George Craig, Martha Dow Fesenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, editors 
THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT 
Volume Two: 1941–1956 
864pp. Cambridge University Press. £30 (US $50).
978 0 521 86794 8 

George Craig 
WRITING BECKETT’S LETTERS 
36pp. Sylph Editions / American University of Paris. £10.
978 0 9565092 7 7

Published: 2 November 2011

One of the last of Samuel Beckett’s letters in Volume One of this indispensable edition was written to James Joyce, in January 1940. In it Beckett thanked Joyce for having brought his work to the attention of a potential sponsor. “It was kind of you to write him about Murphy. He offers very kindly to read the translation & to ‘introduce’ me to the French public.” Nearly fourteen years later, Beckett wrote to Mania Péron, the widow of his friend Alfred, “I am in the shit fontanelle deep: rehearsals every day, translations on all sides, people to see. I can’t keep up”. And a month or so after that he wrote to his American lover Pamela Mitchell, “I went to Godot last night for the first time in a long time. Well played, but how I dislike that play now. Full house every night, it’s a disease”.

The “disease” called En Attendant Godot raged untreated in Paris from its first night at the beginning of 1953, and would soon spread around the world. (When Beckett met Mitchell she was in Paris with a view to securing US rights to the play for her employer.) The thirty-three-year-old expatriate Irish writer who responded gratefully to the offer of an introduction to a French public for whom he did not exist had become, at forty-seven, a succès de scandale in his adopted country. He was already a succès d’estime. Translations of the stories and novels that, writing in the first person and in French, he had produced in a sustained burst of creative effort between 1946 and 1950 were in demand from publishers everywhere. If this was a situation he had not foreseen or done much to bring about – it was due mainly, as far as we can tell from his Letters 1941–1956, to the good offices of women such as his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Péron and Jacoba van Velde, his publisher Jérôme Lindon and critics such as the Maurices Nadeau and Blanchot – no more did he try to put a stop to it. Letters from this period of his first modest acclaim find him firmly declining to promote himself, but as firmly reproaching the all-powerful Simone de Beauvoir for failing in her editorial responsibility to a fellow artist – himself. To be the author of Godot was something else again.

I am no longer the same, and will never again be able to be the same, after what you have done

Success meant little to Beckett beyond a threat to his privacy, and the inevitable incomprehension. Godot did, though, bring its rewards – the encounter with Pamela Mitchell was presumably one. Another was a modest retreat at Ussy-sur-Marne, from where, as Beckett’s fame grew, his letters were more and more likely to be sent. (Reclusive he might have been; out of touch or unreachable he was not.) Here he indulged in the blameless pleasures of the unlikely propriétaire (“I am already, do not miss this, eating my own onions . . .”), and, when unable or disinclined to write, busied himself laying waste to his small plot of land, digging, clearing, “pulverizing the pretty charlock with Weedone”. In his introduction to this volume – a long and subtly insightful essay in its own right – Dan Gunn assimilates the Beckettian husbandry to “a form of dispossession . . . perhaps closest to the psychic mechanisms and peculiar temporality of mourning”. It was also a continuation by other means of the war against the “cut-and-dried segment of sanctity and loveliness” – the well-made poem, novel or play – that Beckett had waged from his beginnings, though never to such effect as during his four-year “siege”. And it is in one or two reports from the country (to Mania Péron or Mitchell again) that we can hear, as nowhere else in this book, an after-echo of Molloy or Malone from the novels named after them: “I know all about couch grass, and the fearsome bindweed, and the way to get the dandelion with its root . . . . Apple trees and pear trees shed their fruit barely formed and the currant bushes, as if taken by surprise in order to please me, are going back to the wild”.

Beckett was not unresponsive to some of the other circumstances to which Godot gave rise. Late in 1953, far from the boulevards of Montparnasse, Karl-Franz Lembke had staged his own production, in his own translation, in the prison of Lüttringhausen where he was an inmate. “Godot was a triumph! . . . ‘Our’ Godot, ours, our very own”, Lembke wrote excitedly to its author, who was moved to reply,

“In all my life as a man and a writer, nothing like this has ever happened to me . . . . I am no longer the same, and will never again be able to be the same, after what you have done, all of you. In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark nor wholly silent.”

Not long before, a little closer to home, one Edouard Coester, a successful lawyer who as Edmond Costère was also a composer, wrote to Beckett asking if he could set Godot to music: “There would never be any question of mere background music, but of a work sung from start to finish . . .”. Beckett replied politely, no, he didn’t think so, “For what is at issue is a speaking whose function is not so much that of having a meaning as of putting up a struggle, poor I hope, against silence, and leading back to it”. (A piece of “pure” music, inspired by the play, would be something else – “And then what about silence itself, is it not still waiting for its musician?”.) There is a fairly banal sense in which all Beckett’s writing – all writing – is a struggle against silence, and leads back to it. It is Beckett’s qualification, “poor I hope”, that alerts us to something out of the ordinary. The young Beckett, a disciple of Joyce (the Joyce of “Work in Progress” rather than Ulysses), a brilliant, learned, polyglot literary experimentalist and a busy translator of Surrealist poems and essays, had declared his fidelity to “the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven . . . the terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of the insane areas of silence, whose audibilities are no more than punctuation in a statement of silences”, as his protagonist/mouthpiece Belacqua puts it, in the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in 1932 (it remained unpublished till after Beckett’s death). Silence that expressed the inexpressible, hinting at a convulsive unreason beyond the reach of art – of realist art anyway – became the condition that circumscribes all speech, all life. In between there occurred six years of world war, a convulsion of unreasoning violence on an unprecedented scale.

The first letter in this new volume dates from 1945. From 1942 Beckett and Suzanne were in hiding in unoccupied France after the Resistance cell to which he had been recruited by Alfred Péron was betrayed to the Gestapo. Péron, along with many of Beckett’s other friends, did not survive. Beckett was profoundly marked by the horrors of war and Occupation – just how profoundly, the editors point out, is attested by the fact that he did not refer to them anywhere, with the exception of a radio broadcast paying tribute to the work of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô in Normandy, where Beckett was a volunteer in 1945–6: “some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again”. This “vision and sense” and the experiences that gave rise to it, never explicitly touched on, nonetheless haunt everything Beckett subsequently created: worlds in which unexplained disappearances and displacements, systematized cruelty and the eruption of brutal, seemingly unmotivated violence are only to be expected. And, Gunn suggests, they haunt his letters too:

“gone – or almost – are the fizzing tirades of the early years, the self-pity, the rancour, the occasional self-indulgent displays of cleverness, almost as if so much suffering had put the cap forever on a merely personal expression of disadvantage or misprision . . . . As if bitterness had been transmuted into something more deeply reflective: not an acceptance of horror and injustice, but an acceptance of the communality of loss and the reversibility of the roles of victim and persecutor.”

With Péron, the most important loss Beckett suffered in the war years was probably that of the non-combatant Joyce, who died, aged fifty-eight, in 1941. Of him Beckett said “The more Joyce knew, the more he could”. From this, an ideal of art as omniscience, supreme adequacy and repleteness, Beckett turned towards one of, as he put it, ignorance and impotence, the art of “a non-know-er, a non-can-er”. Four novellas, the novels Mercier et Camier, Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable, and two plays (the suppressed Eleuthéria as well as Godot) followed, each composed in about six months, except for L’Innommable, which presented greater difficulties. To their author, whose creative life had hitherto been characterized by false starts, paralysis and self-confessed indigence, nothing (including his own survival) could have seemed less ordained.

Indigence, confusion, inexplicable compulsion, the terrible comedy of human resourcefulness: these are the matter of the French stories and novels, whose manner is an exhaustive inventory of self and circumstances but whose protagonist/narrators are serially dispossessed of habitation, mobility, life and function apart from, apparently, that of writing or speech. Whatever these works in fact owe to Beckett’s wide literary culture, they seem without precedent in literature, and have, in their contingency, their “impossibility”, the character of an unjustifiable fact. The younger Beckett would have attempted both to affirm and to negate them with knowing self-mockery. But now he elaborated, in letters written to Georges Duthuit between 1948 and ’51, ostensibly about modern painting and especially the Dutchman Bram van Velde, an aesthetic of failure, renunciation, falling short; a theory of art (“Does there exist, can there exist, or not, a painting that is poor, undisguisedly useless, incapable of any image whatever, a painting whose necessity does not seek to justify itself?”) that might accommodate the paradoxical existence not just of van Velde’s works, but of his own as well.

Beckett had first met van Velde in 1937. “It was dreadful”, he told Charles Juliet (Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, 1995). “Bram was living in terrible poverty, all alone in his studio with his paintings, which he was showing to nobody. He had just lost his wife and was so dejected . . . . He let me get a little closer to him.” For his part van Velde told Juliet, “Meeting Beckett was a truly miraculous stroke of luck . . . . If I hadn’t had Beckett in 1940, I’m not so sure I could have stood it”, and, unequivocally, “The friendship with Beckett is the most important event in my life”. In the 1970s, when these conversations took place, van Velde spoke of painting in terms that are interchangeable with Beckett’s: “You can’t know anything. Knowledge is no use”, “Failure is more common than success. In painting as in life”, “You have to be devoid of all resources”, “[These gouaches] . . . derive from life. They are born of the unknown – and not of habit, or know-how, or intention, or some recipe”. Forty years before, when Beckett became the principal exponent of van Velde’s art (there were not many others), he and Bram were both known for their silences, their extreme diffidence, and an asceticism that was only partly enforced. Both soon attracted the attention of Duthuit, the cultured and charismatic art historian who revived and edited Transition after the Second World War.

French is the language of the infinitesimal

He found in Beckett an indefatigable (and mostly anonymous) translator of prose and verse for the magazine, and in turn seems to have acted as goad, confessor and confidant. Duthuit’s son described his father’s relationship with Beckett as “volcanique” and Beckett’s long letters to him, often apparently written in the small hours with drink taken, are full of trust, affection and exasperation. Encouraged but not indulged by the older man, Beckett, unable or unwilling to talk about himself, can, as he ruefully admits, talk about nothing else – whether in general terms: “It is all in the old sentence from Geulincx quoted in Murphy, Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis [Where you are worth nothing may you also wish for nothing]”, or when he tries to articulate why van Velde is so important to him: “[his] painting is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all these forms . . . . There is, if you like, refusal and refusal to accept refusal . . . . For my part, it is the gran rifiuto that interests me, not the heroic wrigglings to which we owe this splendid thing”, or even more explicitly addresses his own abnegation of will, desire, ambition, his sense of being beyond any predicament, any “position” he might provisionally adopt:

“I do not know what it is (being in it discourages you from knowing), but I know that it is a great consolation, for everything, everywhere, above all in front of the blank page, and I badly need to be consoled: I am proud, but not proud in that way. Is my strength ebbing away? Fine . . . . Anything that lessens me, starting with my precious memories, makes access to it easier. I shall be running no risks by living in it – I shall hardly have time to be born in it. And no doubt it will be at that birth that, at last, the work will have to stop . . . . One ceases. But with the help, all the same, of another being who, if he is never to find expression (and who knows?) is nonetheless heavily involved in . . . the business. If that is what death is, let’s have it.”

As will be clear, these are difficult, densely written letters, in which Beckett seeks, not so much to explain himself as explain to himself something he has already done, and simultaneously pre-empt the more publishable essay Duthuit had asked for. His ideas – and some of his sentences – were indeed distilled into the “Three Dialogues” on art that made their first appearance in Transition, but we are as yet a long way from the clowning and the suavely uncompromising dicta of those published exchanges: “nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” being the best known.

“Never understood so clearly as when reading you, not even when reading Proust”, Beckett wrote in a ps. to Duthuit, “to what extent French is the language of the infinitesimal.” At least half of the letters in this volume, including (or above all) those to Duthuit, were originally written in French. Their translator, George Craig, was commissioned to review Pour finir encore et autres foirades, a collection of Beckett’s brief late pieces, for the TLS in the 1970s. He duly submitted his review, which failed to appear, as did proofs. At length “a senior figure” explained the error that had caused the delay, and sent him For to end yet again and other fizzles, Beckett’s own translation of the work, wanting to know “if it was different from Pour finir encore”. “If I could have answered that question”, says Craig, “everything that needed to be known about Samuel Beckett would be known.”

Well, perhaps. But whether or not that is strictly true, the question why Beckett moved into French was one he himself remained unwilling or unable to answer, beyond some guarded or throwaway responses to researchers’ enquiries. The eloquently incorrect “Pour faire remarquer moi” is the most disarming of these, less to be expected anyway than his reply to one such enquiry here (in February 1954), to the effect that “It was not deliberate. It was in order to change, to see, nothing more complicated than that . . . . I will all the same give you one clue: the need to be ill-equipped”. Short of Beckett himself, his letters could hardly have found a better-equipped translator than Craig, or a more painstaking one. Craig’s accounts – in his translator’s preface to this new volume, and in Writing Beckett’s Letters, the latest in the attractive “Cahiers” series also edited by Gunn – of the challenges he faced, from the near-illegibility of Beckett’s hand to the idiosyncrasies of his syntax, bespeak the great resources he has deployed in rising to them. (One tiny example of his ear for French idiom and for Beckett’s way with it: one of the Textes pour rien, Beckett tells Mania Péron, “est en mauvaise voie”, which becomes “is ill on the way”, not merely going badly but, as it were, with a galloping badness.) Those resources might not be called on again to such intense effect once the Duthuit correspondence has petered out, but it would be an unusually demanding reader who felt they had been short-changed.

In agreeing to publication of his letters, Beckett stipulated that only those “having bearing on [his] work” should be published, and his executors have adhered to this principle with some rigour. The first volume, Letters 1929–1940 (2009), printed 60 per cent of the total number available from the period, and was “fraught with difficulties of interpretation” for the editors, they tell us in the general introduction to this one. Whatever was left out, the majority of those earlier published letters were to Tom MacGreevy; many related Beckett’s excited discoveries as he stood in the art galleries of London, Dresden or Munich. Almost all of them simultaneously revealed a great deal about the young Beckett, and had the greatest possible bearing on his work – especially the work still to come. In one of numerous possible examples, Beckett admits to “fatuous torments . . . a composition that was invalid from the word ‘go’” and to “sweats & shudders & panics & rages & rigours & heartburstings”, and in the same letter asks, far from rhetorically, “Is there some way of devoting pain & monstrosity & incapacitation to the service of a demanding cause?”. From one point of view, his life was spent doing exactly that.

For Letters 1941–1956 the editors have selected only 40 per cent of the total available – though it contains more letters than the earlier volume, to a greater number of people. The fact is that Beckett wrote more letters and, the editors point out, “had more correspondents in the post-War period, and more of his letters were kept”. This time, we are told, selection was more straightforward, as “there is much more work produced in these years, and Beckett is concerned in his letters with little else . . . . There remain only a very few letters which the editors would have included but which were not approved”. For readers, what matters is the way in which a given letter has bearing on the work, or what kind of bearing it has. Once Beckett’s writings had begun, in the early 1950s, to arrive between the austere covers of Les Éditions de Minuit and, not long after, those of Grove Press, he was corresponding regularly with publishers and putative translators. (And, after the noisier arrival of Godot, with producers, directors and actors as well.) Sure enough, to all of them he made some startlingly direct comments on the works. “Molloy . . . won’t go into English, I don’t know why. It would have to be entirely rethought and rewritten which is I fear a job only myself can undertake . . . . My English is queer”; “I want a theatre reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments. That is Protestantism if you like, we are what we are”; “Time that stands still, that skips over whole lives, space no easier to cross than the head of a pin, these are perhaps the true false gods of [Godot], if it absolutely has to have some”. Sometimes the focus narrows to the infinitesimal: “‘Toute imparfaite qu’elle fût’ is in my view a serious imperfection, and I have left the indicative”.

All this is invaluable, from almost any point of view. Inevitably, though, more and more of the letters are given to addressing business matters, rights and contracts for translations – which Beckett initially regards as a necessary chore, less trouble than correcting someone else’s attempts – and editions. This can be wearying, if never more so than to Beckett himself, for whom stoicism and self-disgust go hand in hand as “the obligation to express” is all but overwhelmed by obligations of a very different kind.

Punctilious in all these dealings, continuing to bring a laser-like attention to verbal or theatrical details, implacable (but not unyielding) with regard to the integrity of his texts, professing distaste for what he has written and fatigue at the thought of writing anything new: this is Beckett as we already imagined him, or knew him from the biographies. It seems legitimate to wonder whether any of those “very few letters which the editors would have included” might have shown him in a different light, or had a different kind of bearing on his work. They are unlikely to have been of the kind whose publication could have given offence, since this time, the editors remind us, Beckett “is no longer a young writer making his way, impatient of others’ failure to give him recognition, irritated by the success of authors of whom he is contemptuous”. The internal evidence points rather to some of Beckett’s letters to Pamela Mitchell, since in this respect we can perhaps know him slightly better from the biographies – from James Knowlson’s, anyway. His Damned to Fame includes passages from letters that either do not appear at all, or appear truncated, in Letters 1941–1956. There is no telling whether the missing material amounts to much or little, but as far as the passages Knowlson quotes are concerned, readers have had access to them since 1996, so their suppression here is hard to understand. If it is due to a desire to respect Beckett’s wishes, it was misguided. As we can read in Damned to Fame but not in this volume, in November 1954, sunk in grief for his brother, in guilt and remorse (it was clear to him that “things” did not include his affair with her), Beckett wrote to Mitchell:

“For me things must go on as they are. I have not enough life left in me even to want to change them . . . . The notion of happiness has no meaning at all for me any more. All I want is to be in the silence . . . . Don’t imagine I don’t feel your unhappiness. I think of it every hour, with misery . . . . You will be happy one day and thank me for not involving you any deeper in my horrors.”

Painful as this is to read, it can hardly be said to have no bearing on Beckett’s work – on Fin de partie that was gestating, on Krapp’s Last Tape, Comment c’est, Play or Eh Joe.Behind that “even to want to change them” whisper the lines from Leopardi, “non che la speme, il desiderio e spento”, to which Beckett all his life expressed himself indebted.

A handful of letters that are included here concern losses that were not communal at all, but acutely personal to Beckett: of his mother and brother, who both died in this period. Again, these letters have a bearing on the work that is, to say the least, equal to that of anything Beckett wrote to Roger Blin or Barney Rosset or Minuit’s proofreader. They are also very beautiful:

“I keep watching my mother’s eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood, that of old age. Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make. I think these are the first eyes that I have seen. I have no wish to see any others, I have all I need for loving and weeping, I know now what is going to close, and open inside me . . . .”

– Beckett wrote to Duthuit on one of his visits home to Ireland when his mother had begun to fail. (The death of a mother is the central revisited event in Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, for which Beckett returned to his mother tongue for the first time – outside letters and translations – in twelve years.) From Ireland again, where he had gone to be with his brother in the latter’s last weeks, he wrote to Mitchell, “So it goes, with great ingratitude for such a great thing as to be able to rise and move from one’s place, if only a few sad steps”. Less the lover’s sad steps, as in the sonnet by Philip Sidney, than those from mourning to melancholia: “melancholy mad” is the phrase Beckett uses in gently distancing himself from the woman whom he simultaneously recalls with longing.

The same radical dissociation between self and other, self and world (“There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without these esteemed commodities”) is assumed by Beckett’s writing from beginning to end; only, at a particular moment he found the means by which to express it, instead of being “incapacitated” by it. The inescapable logic of that expression, like the personal reality it embodies (“the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle”), only looks like an impoverishment to those who have more of both self and world than they know what to do with. Yet few modernist writers speak with such intensity as Beckett does of what was his to love; or have felt so keenly the impossibility of speech and, at the same time, its beauties and exactions. Beckett’s own gran rifiuto, his “poor” struggle against silence, was compelled by an intuition of what he calls here “the impossible that we are, impossible living creatures, impossibly alive, of whom neither the time of the body, nor the investment by space are any more to be retained than the shades of evening or the beloved face”. As Gunn says, the writings in which he gave voice to this “would change our very conception of the literary”. Biographers and scholars have done much to help us understand those writings’ background, their sources both literary and personal. What it meant to be their author, though, becomes clearer and clearer with the publication of his letters, which restore to the foreground an artist who was neither a secular saint nor the seminar-haunting purveyor of postmodern nostrums that some academic work has willed into being. The accompanying translations, introductions, notes (there are one or two slips or uncertainties over dating, but these hardly signify), chronologies and profiles of the principal correspondents make of this volume, like its predecessor, an embarras de richesses. It is one for which we are greatly in the editors’ debt.