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Still Telling the Old Story

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2011.0081

1080-6601

John Pilling,

American and British Literature Analysis

Still Telling the Old Story1 John Pilling The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2, 1941-1956. Samuel Beckett. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xciii + 791. $50.00(cloth). I am far more he who finds than he who tells what he has found, now as then, most of the time, I do not exaggerate.2 A writer's letters exist in that ill-defined space between biography and literature, awkwardly intermediate between what would have been spoken in a face-to-face encounter and what in the event has emerged from a pen in the hand or a keyboard at the fingertips.3 It is clear from Beckett's so-called trilogy (a word he loathed) that the issue of where and how the spoken and the written word might meet left him uncertain which of the two was dominant over the other.4 This dynamic generated not three but (with Moran) four monologues assigned to figures who make much of the fact that they are writing, even when, in The Unnamable, it becomes "entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate."5 In The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 1929-1940, the whole world—"from China to Peru," as it were—was offered an unprecedented opportunity to encounter Beckett's voice in "the spontaneous combustion of the spirit."6 These letters were nevertheless written artifacts, often composed with as much forethought and artistic skill as the (for the most part failed) literary projects of the 1930s. In The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2, 1941-1956, the threat of failure still looms large, but with unanticipated—and almost unwished-for—successes waiting in the wings: the "Three Novels," Godot, and the glimmerings of Fin de Partie, as well as a number of other, less obviously achieved, enterprises (Mercier et Camier, the Nouvelles, Eleutheria). As lived, these years were just as much a matter of "the incoherent continuum" as what had gone before.7 As read—now that they can be—they compose themselves into a kind of narrative, even if in so doing they leave behind pockets of obscurity which will presumably have to be probed—if they ever can [End Page 899] be—with other investigative tools to the fore. Beckett, who was self-confessedly "always . . . on the look-out for an elsewhere,"8 usually managed to find one when he felt the need to do so. "Forgive all this autobiography," Beckett wrote to George Reavey in a letter of 15 December, 1946, when the whole of the previous paragraph had really been an essay in bibliography (L, 2, 49). There are innumerable compelling themes and variations here that will keep Beckett scholars busy for years to come. For the practical purposes of a review, however, it seems permissible to privilege a number of dominant threads, each a variant on, or arising out of, Beckett's reluctance to relinquish a "dualist" conception of creativity, as he outlined to Georges Duthuit in the third of their Three Dialogues of 1949. The most obvious dualism (cf. "Les Deux Besoins" of 1938) in Beckett's writing career is the question of whether to write in French or English. In re-translating Ralph Manheim's version of Duthuit's The Fauvist Painters, he laments the fact that "English as English" is resisting him.9 It is as if his native language were actively participating in the very poetics of empêchement10 that he was seeking, however undogmatically, to endorse. Yet Beckett can also be seen insisting that English remained a baseline from which to set out, and a possible point of return when even French failed: "I do not see English as a foreign language," he wrote to Hans Naumann on 17 February, 1954 (L, 2, 464). His prediction to George Reavey of 15 December, 1946, "I do not think I shall write very much in English in the future" (L, 2, 48), is fulfilled, and can even be joked about, in a typically convoluted way, in a later letter to the same correspondent.11 He wrote to Jérôme Lindon on...