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<i>The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956</i> (review)

2012; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mdr.2012.0034

1712-5286

Enoch Brater,

Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence

Reviewed by: The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956 Enoch Brater George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, eds. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 866. $31.50 (Hb). The recent publication of the second instalment in the four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett covers the years 1941-56 and continues the ambitious work Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck set for themselves in a landmark project initiated some three decades ago. For the massive undertaking, made possible by generous support from Emory University and several granting agencies, most notably NEH, the halfway mark is now at hand and provides the Beckett specialist with an extremely useful cache [End Page 410] of primary source material, incomplete though each volume is fated to be. The editors have laboured under the constraints set by the Beckett Estate and by Beckett himself, who insisted that only those letters dealing directly with his work (and not his personal life) could enter the public domain. That limitation was to a large extent overcome in the first volume of the series (1929-40), where we are everywhere able to see a young and fertile imagination struggling to find a voice all its own - and of its own particular making, something like "a voice" to come out of "the dark." In these early and richly suggestive selections, over-written but full of irony, wordplay, and what Beckett elsewhere disparaged as "the loutishness of learning" ("Gnome" 7), we see hints of the remarkable writer he would soon become. And as we read through these magnificent early letters, we hardly notice what isn't there: all those other things that can and do and always spark every artist's imagination, most especially so in the case of a literary innovator of this magnitude. One can only wonder if volume two might have had the same energy and weight had it somehow managed to evade the injunction under which its editors were operating. For the years covered in this second volume, those that saw the completion of signature works like Waiting for Godot, the beginnings of Endgame, and the trilogy of novels we know as Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, were precisely those in which Beckett became "Beckett," the most significant European writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Alas, the letters we are allowed to read here, though they tell us a lot about other things, say precious little about how this remarkable transformation was wrought. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, collaborating in this case with fellow editors Dan Gunn and George Craig (translator extraordinaire), can hardly be faulted; they have done tremendous work in preparing this second volume for publication, which is, from a professional and book-making point of view, clear, concise, accessible, and in nearly every case, usefully and carefully annotated. As in the previous volume, those Beckett letters originally written in French are followed by an English translation (though not the other way around), taking into account the linguistic range of the large and potential audience for the material under consideration. And yet, in some instances, the annotation is more discrete than it need be. None of the letters written to Pamela Mitchell, for example, is given a footnote to make clear that she was not only Beckett's friend but also his one-time lover, even though this information is readily available in several other sources (Beckett, in fact, wrote sixty-one letters to Mitchell over a period of seventeen years). Will the subsequent two volumes be as non-committal when Barbara Bray, a drama-script editor for BBC Radio Drama during the time he was working on Embers, comes into the picture? One of the inescapable effects of the strictures placed on this otherwise useful volume is that the very accomplishment it sets out to display is oddly [End Page 411] diminished. Most of the letters included here seem to deal with matters of professional profiling rather than artistic considerations. There's ample correspondence with mostly devoted publishers in New York (Barney Rosset), London (pre-John Calder), Paris (Jerome Lindon), and other European capitals, as this writer is, to...