NONFICTION
Waiting for Beckett: Early letters a mere prologue of writer’s life
Only pedants, fools and opportunists shun the obvious.
The criminally obvious thing to say about this immensely important annunciation of a four-volume project is this: at the end of its 782 pages, Samuel Beckett isn’t really Samuel Beckett yet.
By 1940, he is the author of: a study of Proust, the poetry in “Whoroscope” and “Echo’s Bones,” the stories in “More Pricks Than Kicks,” and the novel “Murphy.” And if he had died in the war shortly thereafter instead of becoming a hero in the French resistance (“boy scout stuff” he characteristically dismissed it later), he’d have been known to us now only tangentially as a promising Irish Joycean who lived in France, had been Joyce’s private secretary and had painfully — and with sad consequence — spurned the love of Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia.
But in 2009, he’s anything but that. To us, he is one of the two utterly cardinal post-modern masters, writers of gargantuan influence and reputation whom the history of literature in the second half of the 20th century couldn’t do without.
The other, of course, would be his public sharer of the 1964 Formentor Prize which has now gone down in history as one of the most perspicacious and least invidious exemplars of one of the literary world’s most dubious activities (i. e. prize-giving) — Jorge Luis Borges.
Beckett and Borges, Borges and Beckett. They are the twin towers of world literature in the latter 20th century — one Irish who wrote letters in English, French and German, one an Argentinian civil servant who read English literature first and was, in effect, a citizen of the Library before anything else.
But by 1940, Beckett wasn’t that writer yet. He wasn’t even an established playwright, yet, for heaven’s sake. He was merely an extraordinarily interesting man who would, as one biographer rather eloquently put it, soon be “damned to fame.”
If there has ever been a shrewder literary genius than Samuel Beckett, that writer’s name doesn’t come easily to mind. No one understood the perils of a writer’s letters better than the elder Beckett, by then a Nobel laureate and a man who reinvented the very ideas of language, drama and literature in a post-Holocaust, post-modern world. He wanted posterity (that is, US) to know his voluminous lifetime of correspondence only selectively in those letters that touched his work.
So, then, where does that leave us now in this first huge volume which, in effect, announces one of the most important publishing projects of the next decade or more?
It leaves us knowing that the tale will properly begin in Vol. II, when the history of his play “Waiting for Godot” begins and, ever afterward, inflects everything the world would henceforth come to know as serious drama or literature.
The oeuvre after “Godot” isn’t exactly a repudiation of the work of the fascinating and brilliant
but minor Joycean he was by the time this collection concludes. But nor is it the predictable future — except in retrospect — of the writer we say goodbye to here writing to a Parisian friend in the art world (as translated into English): “Devils are like angels. Beg yours to stay and he will go away” and “You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose: a self that you did not know, if you’re lucky.”
That self was still to come — utterly unimaginable, no doubt, to the young Samuel Beckett who would emerge from Joycean encyclopedism into the most powerful minimalism 20th century literature would ever know.
Anyone searching for “dish” in his letters on his tragic but unavoidable rejection of Joyce’s deeply disturbed daughter Lucia won’t find it.
Nor will anyone find Beckett reflecting at great length on one of the more peculiar incidents in what would become a rather startlingly eventful life — his 1938 stabbing in Paris while defending a friend of his while walking with him and his wife to their apartment. (Joyce’s intercession got his impecunious friend a private hospital room.)
The drama, in effect, hasn’t started yet. This massive volume — fascinating for Beckettians and scholars no doubt — isn’t even Act I, it seems to me. It is, in effect, the prologue.
It is Vol. II that will, in effect, be Act I. That is when Beckett joins the French Resistance. And, after the Parisian premiere of “En Attendant Godot” in 1953 (he began writing it in 1948), theater would come to be redefined, along with literature itself and the people who produce it.
He would, as he put it, subtract rather than add. Literary work would learn a new mathematics.
What an Act I—and after— that will be, even with Beckett’s strictures about publishing his letters.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck Cambridge University Press 782 pages, $50
Jeff Simon is The News’ arts and books editor.
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