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A JOURNEY FROM, AND NOT TO: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, volume i: 1929-1940. Edited by MARTHA DOW FEHSENFELD and LOIS MORE OVERBECK, in association with DAN GUNN and GEORGE CRAIG

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/escrit/cgq027

1471-6852

Claudia Nelson,

Modernist Literature and Criticism

In his poem ‘Incantata’, written for the late artist and printmaker Mary Farl Powers, Paul Muldoon discerns in his former lover ‘what seems always true of the truly great’ – that is, ‘a winningly inaccurate / sense of your own worth’ and a readiness to ‘second-guess / yourself too readily by far’. It is a definition of greatness that might be applied to Samuel Beckett as well, certainly to the Beckett we meet in the first volume of his correspondence, covering the years 1929 to 1940. Beckett himself applied it to James Joyce, a formidable if slightly off-stage influence at the beginning of the book and ‘just a very lovable human being’ by its end: ‘He was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent’ (to Thomas McGreevy, 5 January 1938). But Beckett seems never to have recognised that his own lack of faith in his talent could be proof that it was there. ‘This writing is a bloody awful grind’, he complained in 1933, unable to imagine that More Pricks than Kicks would be published the following year, let alone Murphy in 1938, Waiting for Godot in 1953, and a Nobel Prize given to him in 1969. ‘I find it more and more difficult to write and I think it worse and worse in consequence’ (to McGreevy, 13 May 1933). This tendency to mistrust and undervalue his writing is a large part of what makes it so fascinating and so difficult to watch Beckett realise, gradually and reluctantly over the course of eleven years and almost 700 pages of letters, that he can do nothing other than write.