Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940</i> (review)

2010; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mdr.2010.0011

1712-5286

Jonathan Boulter,

Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence

Reviewed by: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 Jonathan Boulter Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 880, illustrated. $50.00 (Hb). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 is the first of a projected four-volume edition of Beckett’s selected letters. According to the introductory material in this first volume (which includes introductions to the series and to the volume, prefaces from the French and German translators, and a note on editorial procedures), the editors have at their disposal 15,000 transcribed letters of which they propose to publish approximately 2,500 in full, with an additional 5,000 to be cited in annotations. For Beckett scholars and lay readers, this project represents nothing less than a monumental publishing event. Beckett agreed to the publication of his letters under certain conditions: he specified that the correspondence should be edited down to “those passages only having bearing on my work” (xiv). This stipulation gave rise to some conflict among those involved in the editorial process, with some insisting on a strict interpretation of Beckett’s words (for example, Jerome Lindon) and others, Fehsenfeld and Overbeck included, preferring a more liberal interpretation. A compromise was struck, and what is presented here are letters that directly mention Beckett’s work or that show Beckett’s interest in and relation to a larger literary and cultural context. [End Page 412] The period covered by volume one saw the publication of Proust (1931), More Pricks than Kicks (1934), Echo’s Bones (1935), and Murphy (1938). And while the letters do not offer much by way of interpretation of the work –this, of course, is to be expected of Beckett – they re-enforce what we know about Beckett’s attitude towards his own writing and towards the process of writing generally. The letters are replete with complaints about not being able to write, not wishing to write, not seeing any purpose to writing. In 1932 he writes, “I haven’t tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous” (111); in 1933, “This writing is a bloody awful grind” (157); in 1936, “I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them” (362); and still in 1936, while touring Germany, “I keep a pillar to post account, but have written nothing connected since I left home, nor disconnected. And not the fhart of a book beginning” (397). It is fascinating that these personal statements match up with Beckett’s published pronouncements on writing, as, for instance, in his “Three Dialogues” where he speaks of the artist who has “[n]othing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (556). And it is fascinating to track the process by which writing is produced in spite of itself, perhaps to spite its own author. In this sense, the letters begin to offer themselves as literary-theoretical works in their own right. Beckett’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, for instance, has already come to be seen as a theoretical pronouncement; in it, he speaks of language as a veil that needs to be torn apart “to get at those things (or the nothingness) lying behind them” (518); he speaks also of the desire to reach the “literature of the non-word” (52). In an earlier letter (1933), Beckett reflects on what his writing aspires to be; his thoughts, magnificently tropological, are revealing: There is a kind of writing corresponding with acts of fraud & debauchery on the part of the writing-shed. The moan I have more & more to make with mine is there – that is nearly all trigged up, in terrain, faute d’orifice, heat of friction and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit to compensate the pus & the pain that threatens its economy, fraudulent manoeuvres to make the cavity do what it can’t do – the work of the abscess. (134) Both letters contain provocative statements that would seem to anticipate his later work. We may, for instance, think of the...