He fears that the very
knowledge
he is accruing may itself be ruining his future chances, turning him into a "Sorbonagre," leading him to a spurious realm of knowingness.
Samuel Beckett
D.
Roberts for Michael Roberts, and for his permission to consult The Michael Roberts Archive before its deposit in the National Library of Scotland; Routledge (an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group) for T.
M.
Ragg; The Board of Trinity College Dublin for letters written by Thomas Brown Rudmose Brown, Walter Starkie, and Robert W.
Tate on behalf of Samuel Beckett; Daniel Hay for Jean Thomas; Lady Staples and other representatives of The Estate of Arland Ussher; John H.
Willis; Grainne Yeats on behalf of the copyright held by Michael Yeats for Jack B.
Yeats.
lxx
Permission to publish has also been granted by the following owners ofletters, manuscripts, and other documents: Klaus Albrecht; Archives nationales, Paris; The Beckett International Foundation, Reading University; Trustees of The British Museum; The Poetry Collection, State University ofNew York at Buffalo; University ofCape Town; The Chatto and Windus Archives at Reading University; Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Private Collection ofNuala Costello; Dartmouth College Library; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Association Les Amis de Jeanne et Otto Freundlich; Peter Gidal, London; David Hone; The Lilly Library, Indiana University; Department ofSpecial Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University ofKansas; Private Collection ofDr. Katarina Kautsky, nee Sauerlandt; Northwestern University Library; Berg Collection ofEnglish and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Princeton University Library; Archives Jacques Putman, Paris; Tatiana Goryaeva, Director, Rossijsky Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (RGALI; Russian State Archive ofLiterature and Art); Morris Sinclair; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University ofTexas at Austin; The Board ofTrinity College Dublin; Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Hans E. Janke Bequest.
Permissions
lxxi
AN AUP BIF
BM
Burns Library
CtY
DeU ENS GN HK ICSo ICU
IEN IMEC
InU KF KU
MBA MOMA
lxxii
Archives nationales, Paris
The American University of Paris
Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading
British Museum, London
John J. Burns Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Boston College
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
University of Delaware Library, Newark Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris Germanisches Nationalmuseum Niirnberg Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Institut memoires de ! 'edition contemporaine, Paris-Caen
The Lilly Library, Indiana University
Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin
Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasburg
Museum of Modern Art, New York
ABBREVIATIONS
LIBRARY, MUSEUM, AND INSTITUTIONAL ABBREVIATIONS
NBuU
NGB NGI NGL NhD
NjP
NLI
NNC, RBML
NPG
NYPL, Berg OkTIJ
RHA RTE TCD
TxU UoR
Albrecht Costello Gidal Sinclair
The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
National Gallery oflreland
National Gallery, London
Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College
Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: Princeton University Library
National Library oflreland
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
National Portrait Gallery, London
New York Public Library, Berg Collection Department of Special Collections, Mcfarlin Library, University ofTulsa, Oklahoma
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
Radio Telefis Eireann
Manuscript Room, Trinity College Dublin Library, when used with reference to manuscript identification; in other instances, a short form for Trinity College Dublin Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin Department ofSpecial Collections, University of Reading
List ofabbreviations
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Private collection of Klaus Albrecht
Private collection of Nuala Costello
Private collection ofPeter Gidal, Index Books Private collection ofMorris Sinclair
lxxiii
List of abbreviations
AvW GD
NRF
OED Pyle
SBT/A
b.
C.
d.
f.
fl. [illeg] ins
ACI ACS
AH
AL draft ALI
ALS AMS AN
lxxiv
ABBREVIATIONS FOR PUBLICATIONS, MANUSCRIPTS, AND TRANSLATORS
Adolf von Baden-Wurttemberg
Samuel Beckett's German Diaries, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading Library
Nouvelle Revue Frani;aise
Oxford English Dictionary, second electronic edition Refers to numbers assigned to paintings by Jack B. Yeats in Hilary Pyle. Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings (London: Andre Deutsch, 1992) 3 vols. , and Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993)
Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui
EDITORIAL ABBREVIATIONS
born
circa
died
folio
flourished
illegible word, words inserted
m.
n. d. pseud. s/
?
< >
with date of marriage or to indicate married name
no date
pseudonym signed uncertain cancelation
ABBREVIATIONS IN BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
autograph card initialed autograph card signed another hand
autograph letter draft autograph letter initialed autograph letter signed autograph manuscript autograph note
pm
List ofabbreviations
ANI autograph note initialed ANS autograph note signed
APCI autograph postcard initialed APCS autograph postcard signed APS autograph postscript
env envelope
illeg illegible
imprinted imprinted with SB's name letterhead imprinted letterhead
postmark Pneu pneumatique
PS postscript
TLC typed letter copy
TLcc typed letter carbon copy TLdraft typed letter draft
TLI typed letter initialed TIS typed letter signed
TMS typed manuscript
TPCI typed postcard initialed TPCS typed postcard signed TPS typed postscript
lxxv
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
"I find it more & more difficult to write, even letters to my friends. " So wrote Samuel Beckett in 1936 to Tom McGreevy, his chief correspond
1
Although Beckett claims in various ways that he hates letters, his sixty years of letters, taken as a whole, number more than fifteen thousand, and form one of the great literary correspondences of the twentieth century. No special pleading need be made as to the impor tance of even perfunctory letters from the hand of a writer as important as Beckett. Yet what will strike the reader is the fact that Beckett seldom writes perfunctory letters. Even when responding in haste, even when
ent for the period represented here, 1929 to 1940. The difficulty of writing letters is not the only one of which the young Beckett com plains, nor is it even the most acute. "I can't read, write, drink, think, feel, or move," he tells his friend Mary Manning Howe, while making his lonely tour round Germany's art treasures; "I seem impelled to address my friends when least in a condition to. "2 Immobility, impos sibility, illness, and impasse: across a human landscape populated by negation, doubt, refusal, and retreat, the letters collected here cut their way, making connections, opening possibilities, courting half-chances, chastising indifference. During this period, letters matter inordinately to Beckett. They are often his sole means of connection: to places where he is not, to people with whom he cannot converse directly, to others with whom he would not wish to converse directly. Letters are a chan nel to possible selves, selves ofwhich he is as yet only dimly aware, even to selves he would deny. Letters make possible a writing, a voice per haps, which his more public work does not yet dare to deploy.
1 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 19316].
2 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936.
lxxvii
Introduction to Volume I
penning a note on the back of a postcard, even when appealing from deep distress, Beckett is an extraordinarily painstaking and careful correspondent. In later years, especially after Waiting for Godot brings its author unexpected celebrity, the quantity of letters which his con scientiousness obliges him to write increases significantly - for him, alarmingly. And as the man becomes a public figure, however reluc tantly, their nature changes too, becoming in large part reactive: responses to requests for information from academics, for permissions from directors, for interpretations from translators, for advice from producers, for schedules from publishers. Here, in the early years, the letters are fewer, but they matter all the more, sent as they are into an epistolary space about which little can be assumed. The early letters convey information nearly always as a secondary function, their pri mary role being that of establishing a relation - by requesting, stirring, provoking, even outraging if necessary. The interest of the recipient is not always assured, often has to be stimulated and then maintained - and this, when what Beckett has to offer is usually far from conven tional or easily palatable.
Biography has an almost ineluctable tendency to make an individu al's greatness seem predestined. The individual's letters, if that individ ual is as lucid in his hesitations and ambivalences as Beckett, serve to restore the uncertainty informing the choices, the dilemmas and daily doubt which might at any point have compelled desertion of the cause or defection to some camp of lesser achievement. Beckett's letters reveal the compromises as well as the bold refusals, the longing for recognition as well as the revulsion at publicity, the numerous false paths almost taken as well as the inner conviction that only one path - the literary - is truly worth following.
Before being one of communication, the job of a letter is, then, to establish common terms between the writer and the recipient (whom the French language helpfully names the destinataire): to create some complicity or solidarity between aspirant and respondent; and to do so beyond the immediate social, geographical, professional, even intellec tual, environs which might otherwise have fostered less deferred or indirect verbal exchange. In doing so the letters permit - or permitted, since one ofthe things which adds to the value ofthis correspondence is that it is hard to imagine there ever arising a twenty-first-century equivalent - an intimacy which is both magnified and diminished,
lxxviii
Introduction to Volume I
both accelerated and delayed, with respect to what could be expected or achieved in conversation. For Beckett, however, the complicity which he is seeking in his letters is also one of which he is acutely wary; he is strongly suspicious of the demand implicit in solidarity; and he is almost cripplingly aware of the extreme constraints forever placed upon intimacy, not least when that intimacy is formed or sustained by the self-consciousness and control which letters permit, with their possibilities of revision and self-censorship. It may be partly in this sense that his "hatred" of letters is to be understood. For Beckett, merely to write, and then release, a letter during this period implies a sort of self-overcoming, a provisional acceptance of community when, as he puts it, "all groups are horrible";3 a climb down from the solitary self-sufficiency to which he aspires, whether he does so as self laceration or as self-aggrandizement (nobody loves me / the world does not deserve me). More simply, letters take their author out of himself. they take him elsewhere. They do this, when the desire to be freed from self, to be elsewhere, is itself being critically appraised by Beckett as one ofthe primary ruses for evasion oftruth and desertion of any putative literary vocation.
The restlessness which Beckett experiences during this period allows him to settle only briefly, and he is almost constantly on the move, between Dublin, London, and Paris, taking in Germany too on several occasions, opting finally for Paris in late 1937, just in time to move again in 1940, although by forces largely beyond his control. The danger in all such physical displacements is clear to him. Writing to Tom McGreevy from Germany in 1936, it is expressed as a question: "Was it then another journey from, like so many? "4 Then, as a confession, he writes to Mary Manning Howe, from the tail-end ofhis German sojourn: "It has turned out indeed to be a journey from, and not to, as I knew it was, before I began it. "5 Thejourneyfrom: when thosejourneys which are letters are equally haunted by the suspicion that they are serving as flight. They are haunted despite the fact that they are incontrovertibly to, letters destined to indeed - and not just to anyone. In their wonderful variety, Beckett's letters are written to appeal to the unique sensibilities and language-possibilities of their particular reader.
34
SB to Thomas McGreevy. 6 June 1939. SB to Thomas McGreevy, 9 October 1936. 5 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 13 December 1936.
lxxix
Introduction to Volume I
The letters collected in this volume attest to a loneliness deriving from a lack of much more than mere companionship. But even as they attest to this lack, they also attenuate it. Wherever Beckett is, he can also be elsewhere, even when on the road. His letters trace out an alternative reality for their writer, and help him to sustain himself, almost as in a spider's web of his own weaving, wherever he is living - and failing fully to live. Of course, for the letter's journey to be successful, for the else wheres to serve their function, these must be invested with affect, whether of desire, ambition, anger, or the longing for recognition. Every recipient must represent some alternative, if not of place or of feeling then of possibility, as in the numerous letters to agents and publishers, letters written reluctantly and with a sinking heart, but in the knowledge that without them his work will remain unknown and his options will only narrow further.
Feeling and possibility may yet meet, and when they do, as in the
great letters to McGreevy, a writing emerges which is quite as exciting
as anything Beckett is achieving with a view to publication. Even to
McGreevy, Beckett can be reticent: he writes to him in French when he
wishes to avoid the risk of being over-read; he scarcely discusses with
him the details of his sexual life, barely mentioning, for example, that
he has "seen quite a lot" of Peggy Guggenheim in 1938; and he tells him
on occasion that he prefers to discuss certain private matters with him
6
inperson. YettoMcGreevy,astoafewselectothers,heopenssome thing perhaps more important than any details of the life lived or the works completed. He opens a sense of the life not yet embarked upon, the life only dreamed of, when these will be immersed to saturation in the past and future that are art: music, painting, literature. Being already the Beckett which he perhaps will only later become in his published oeuvre, he must apologize, even when issuing insights of incalculable value, for a "miserable letter,''7 for "this futile and not even melancholy letter,"8 for "a very white kind of letter,"9 for "this Jeremiad. " 10 But being already, here in his letters, the Beckett who can allow a writing to emerge which is born of vulnerability and release, he
6 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 5 January 1938.
7 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
8 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 24 February 1931.
9 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 November [for 3 November 1932].
10 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
lxxx
Introduction to Volume I
can also admit that 'Tm not ashamed to stutter like this with you who are used to my wild way of failing to say whatl imagine I want to say and who understand that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must stutter or rest. And it needs a more stoical mouth than mine to rest. " 11
The authorized biography of Samuel Beckett, by James Knowlson, bears the title, Damned to Fame (1996). Certainly, Beckett was amazed and often dismayed by the popularity his work gained during the last thirty years of his life. As we have suggested above, this popularity had a direct impact on Beckett the correspondent, dramatically increasing the num ber and considerably altering the nature ofthe letters he wrote. Yet what is striking about Beckett before the years of "fame," is how wary he was ofthe public dimension ofthe arts, even as he was attempting to gain this dimension for himselfand his work. Nowhere is this more patent than in his dealings with publishers. Here, his wariness turns often into a disdain or hostility which is all the more notable in that his principal interloc utors at publishing houses or journals tend to be intelligent, patient, learned, supportive, and gentlemanly: men such as his publisher Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus, a figure almost unimaginable in the cut and thrust of today's trade publishing world. "Truck direct with publish ers," writes Beckett in 1936 when such "truck" is still largely a fantasy, "is one of the few avoidable degradations. " 12 For Beckett, merely attempting to be published is cursed as "creeping and crawling and sollicitation [sic],"13 tantamount to transporting "a load of manure or a ton of bricks"14 to "literary garbage buckets. "15 A six-week delay in response from a certain Rupert Grayson sparks a rare paranoid reaction in which the usual self-deprecation turns into self-inflation, as Beckett worries that: "I have an idea he may try and do the dirty. He has no background and I have nothing to show that he has any ofmy property. "16 In rage, the same day, he writes to George Reavey, one of whose roles it was to mediate his relations with the presses: "Grayson has lost it or cleaned
11 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
12 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
13 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 18 ! August 1932].
14 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 1 March 1930.
15 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday I? summer 1929].
16 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 8 October 1932.
booci
Introduction to Volume I
himself with it. Kick his balls off. "17 Reavey, who fills the role of agent while helping Beckett in many other ways, is the object of the greatest swings of mood and judgment during these years, as Beckett goes from soliciting him to reviling him to needing him, from shunning him to recommending him to his friends. "I neither trust him nor like him," he writes in 1936, "but know no other agent. "18 Things deteriorate when Reavey publishes a Beckett text without its author's permission, to the point where Beckett writes to Reavey a letter so scathing that this per haps explains why it no longer exists; though its content may be recon structed from a letter Beckett writes to McGreevy, in which Reavey is described as: "(1) A liar (2) A clumsy Sophist (3) An illiterate. "19 Within a month, however, Beckett writes, "I extended the little finger of reconci liation to G. R. ";20 and some short time after that he is content once more to be "dumping the work on Reavey. "21
The temptation is ever present, for Beckett, to abandon the effort to diffuse the work beyond the closest circle of friends. But this tempta tion is weak compared to the pressure coming from another source, which Beckett believes can be relieved only by its receiving public recognition. "I dread going home with nothing cut & dried to do," he writes to McGreevy from Germany in 1937: "Proofs & a publication would carry me over till I could get away again. "22 He writes of his mother, that she "supposes I am brimming over with material for books 1 . . . ] anything rather than desoeuvrement. "23 Publishers and their acceptance become the propitiatory flag which he hopes to wave at his exasperated family members, who are in a state of incomprehen sion as to the choices he is making and refusing to make in his life. That the flag is never large enough or appropriately marked, that the public recognition does not arrive in time or from the appropriate quarters, remains one of the major disappointments of Beckett's life.
When approval does come, from as valued a reader as McGreevy, Beckett's joy, if short-lived, is unequivocal. When he learns of his
17 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932.
18 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
19 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 27 June 1936.
20 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 26 July [1936).
21 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
22 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 16 February 1937.
23 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 20 February [1935). "Desoeuvrement" (having nothing
todo).
lxxxii
Introduction to Volume I
friend's favorable judgment ofthe manuscript ofMurphy, he responds: "I need not tell you I was delighted with your letter. I was afraid you would not like it much at all. I find the people all so hateful myself, even Celia, that to have you find them lovable surprises and delights me. "24 Much more common than approval, however, are misprision and rejection, when the skin is never thick enough for these not to hurt. Beckett's brother asks him, '"Why can't you write the way people want"';25 this question is repeated, in more euphemistic terms, by nearly every publisher he encounters. Rejection is accompanied by "the usual kind words,"26 by "honeyed regrets,"27 or by "the classical obeisance et l'obligeance prophetique. "28 Or it comes bluntly: "Heard from Frere-Reeves yesterday, a curt rejection. 'On commercial grounds we could not justify it in our list. ' And ofcourse what other grounds of justification could there be. "29 Some revenge can be wrought, through mockery of "Shatton & Windup" or "The Hogarth Private Lunatic Asylum,"30 or through a limerick penned at the expense of Doubleday Doran. 31 But this revenge is slight when compared to the need: "The chiefthing is to get the book OUf. "32
The willingness ofthe young author to offer words ofcompromise in order to facilitate publication may surprise readers familiar only with the intransigence ofan older Beckett. In response to a publisher's wish for cuts in Murphy, he writes to Reavey: "I should be willing to suppress such passages as are not essential to the whole and adjust such others as seem to them a confusion ofthe issue"; the admonishment to Reavey which follows is an agent's nightmare: "Be astonished, firm, & up to a point politely flexible, all at once, ifyou can. "33 Not surprisingly, the negotiation proves unfruitful, although, with a desperation almost as audible as the irony, Beckett would write: "The last I remember is my
24 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 July 1936.
25 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
26 SBtoThomasMcGreevy,9October1936.
27 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July 11936].
28 SB to George Reavey, 23 February 1937. "Obligeance prophetique" (prophetic
obligingness).
29 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
30 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. And again to Reavey, 27 December 1936.
31 SB to George Reavey, 4 August 1937.
32 SB to George Reavey, 27 December 1936.
33 SB to George Reavey, 13 November 1936.
lxxxiii
Introduction to Volume I
readiness to cut down the work to its title. I am now prepared to go further, and change the title if it gives offence, to Quigley, Trompetenschleim, Eliot, or any other name that the publishers fancy. "34 When finally, thanks in part to the intercession of McGreevy and the painter and writer Jack B. Yeats, Routledge makes an offer on Murphy, Beckett writes, "I would sign anything to get the book out";35 a tractability which asks to be weighed alongside the apparently contradictory, but perhaps equally true, assertion: "I feel even less about its being taken than I did when it was rejected. "36
Indifference on the part of the world, or rejection from the public realm, corresponds so closely - so much more closely than success - to what is being experienced internally, that it provokes instant recogni tion. Defeat before the act, before the writing, will become the very ground of Beckett's imaginative world. Here, already, it gives rise to a plethora of confessions. To McGreevy, of his essay on Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, he writes, "I can't start the Proust. "37 This matures into "I have not put pen to paper on Proust";38 which becomes "You know I can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture";39 followed by "I can't write anything at all, can't imagine even the shape of a sentence";40 leading to "I haven't tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous. "41 Yet somehow his Proust does get written, and he even feels some pride in it, before this is overtaken by distaste at what he judges to be "very grey & disgustingly
juvenile,"42 "a merely critical extension [ . . . J blafard, gritty like the
43
ing," critical writing comes in for very harsh censure:44 "dishonest & surfait" is how he describes his review of Jack Yeats's novel The
34 SB to George Reavey. 20 December 1936. "Trompetenschleim" (Ger. , numpetslime).
35 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
36 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 22 December 1937.
37 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday [? 17 July 1930].
38 SB to Thomas McGreevy, [before 5 August 1930].
39 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 January 1931.
40 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
41 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
42 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 February 1931.
43 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931. '"Blafard" (wan).
44 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
lxxxiv
---
Civic Guard's anus. "
Having been relegated, in this period, to what he calls "slopempty
Introduction to Volume I
Amaranthers. 4s But the judgment meted out to his poetry and fiction is only slightly more generous. "Fake" is a word he uses freely of his own
47
. . o down before the brain knows of grit in the wind. s
The gap between the self which writes and the self which reads can be as much of an affliction as a solace. Yet there is, despite asseverations to the contrary, no shortage of reading done during these years. It is tempting to invoke a notion like "apprenticeship" in this context, and certainly the later Beckett oeuvre is inconceivable without the mass of books consumed during this period. Yet, if apprentice Beckett is, not least to the writer who acts as his mentor and guide during much of the period, James Joyce, then he is one who feels he is not so much learning a trade as failing to gain initiation into a sect.
He fears that the very knowledge he is accruing may itself be ruining his future chances, turning him into a "Sorbonagre," leading him to a spurious realm of knowingness. st "Ifl am not careful," he writes, after he has found in some German novels a new justification for a figure from Murphy,
45 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July [1936].
46 See, for example, SB to Thomas McGreevy, Saturday [3 September 1932[, quoted in
SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932], n. 4.
47 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935. "Involontairement" (involuntarily).
48 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 23 May [1936[.
49 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 9 June 1936.
50 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932. "Facultatif' (optional); "pendu" (hanged
work,
"involontairement trivial";
46
or "really a most unsavoury & not very honest work," as he writes of the first draft of Murphy48 - "It reads something horrid. "49 Nowhere does he express more eloquently what he feels to be lacking in his writing than in a letter to McGreevy from 1932, where he berates himself for its lack of necessity. "Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud" - these become the whips with which to punish the literary self whose productions are never anything better than "trigged up" or "facultatif. " His own writing lacks the urgency and inevitability which for him distinguish work that is true, which must be as instinctive and automatic as a physical reflex, and which he describes memorably, in an expression that will echo through his whole writing life: 'Tm in mourning for the integrity of a pendu's emission of semen [ . . . ] the integrity of the eyelids coming
man).
51 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931.
lxxxv
Introduction to Volume I
"I shall become clear as to what I have written. "52 It is not just that an
ever-increased awareness of literary heritage furnishes the aspiring
writer with a yardstick of personal unworthiness; it is that the partic
ular sort of success which writing constitutes is already perceived to be
achievable only in a sort of blind or spastic incomprehension. "Jenseit
der Spekulation kommt erst der Mensch in sein Eden" (Only beyond
speculation does man reach his Eden), he writes in 1934 to his cousin
53
Fortunately perhaps, not every writer's work which Beckett encounters during this period strikes him as being as necessary as that of Homer or Dante. "I have been reading wildly all over the place," he tells McGreevy in 1936, "Goethe's Iphigenia & then Racine's to remove the taste. "57 Beckett's reading may not be wild, but diverse it certainly is, as even a partial list of authors absorbed will make abundantly clear: Ariosto, Aristotle, Jane Austen, D'Annunzio, Darwin, Diderot, George Eliot, Fielding, Geulincx, Grillparzer, Guarini, Holderlin, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Kant, Keats, Lawrence, Leibniz, Melville, Plato, T. F. Powys, Ramuz, Jules Renard, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Sade, Sainte-Beuve, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Sterne, Tasso, Vigny. Few invite quite the excor iation that Goethe's Tasso receives, yet the view which Beckett forms of
52 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
53 SB to Morris Sinclair, 5 May 1934. 54 SB to Samuel Putnam, 28 June 1932.
55 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935.
56 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
57 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 March 1936.
lxxxvi
Though only later will he formulate this idea fully, in the letters to Georges Duthuit from after World War II, the awareness is already present here of the enticements and traps of knowledge. The remark he makes to Samuel Putnam, as early as 1932, concerning his indebtedness to James Joyce, that "I vow I will get over J. J. ere I die," is justthethinendofthewriter'suncomfortablewedge. 54 Littlewonder that he is delighted to report to McGreevy in 1935 a remark made to him by Nuala Costello: '"You haven't a good word to say for anyone but the failures. "'55 For writing, ifit is to matter, must constitute itselfas a sort of shedding, a venturing out with no clear landmarks, not even when these are literary, and with no sure hope of return: "when to have ever left one's village ceases to seem a folly," he writes to Mary Manning Howe in 1937, "perhaps it is only then that the writing begins. "56
Morris Sinclair.
this work may stand for the many among the canonical greats - Darwin·s The Origin ofSpedes is "badly written catlap"58 - which he dismisses: "He really invites one very patiently to think of him as a machine a mots, a cliche separator, & a bunker of the suffering that has not proved its merit in a thousand impressions, or a vademecum edition. "59 And the dead fare better than the living. It is for his contemporaries that Beckett reserves his most hostile fire, ignited as this is by a mix ofgenuine contempt and barely admissible envy. Beckett calls T. F. Powys's writing "a fabricated darkness & painfully organised unified tragic completeness. . . Go D'Annunzio has a "dirty juicy squelchy mind, bleeding and bursting, like his celebrated pomegranates. "G1 Aldous Huxley's latest offering does not even merit reiteration of its title, becoming "Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work. "G2 Lawrence trades in a "tedious kindling of damp. "G3 T. S. Eliot's essay on Dante is "insufferably condescending, restrained & professo rial. "G4 And Proust too comes in for rough treatment, much rougher in the letters than in the essay on his work, his prose being deemed "more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst," and his loquacity being judged "certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore's, but no less profuse, a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. . . Gs
Little wonder that the prospect of having to read Proust, or of having, as Beckett puts it, "to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes," is far from charming. GG Yet for the Proust to be written, Proust must be read, and not once but twice, in an infuriatingly inadequate edition. More than the exasperation, louder than the condemnations, stronger than the disgust and the envy, what informs Beckett's reading, as it does his writing in his letters about his reading, is its energy. When he wishes to read the work of Arnold Geulincx, "without knowing why exactly,"G7
58 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
59 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936. "Machine a mots" (word machine).
60 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
61 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 July 1930 [for 7 August 1930].
62 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
63 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [7 August 1934].
64 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1937.
65 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
66 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
67 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
lxxxvii
Introduction to Volume I
Introduction to Volume I
he forces himself into the library at Trinity College in Dublin, which he has compelling reasons to wish to avoid, day after day. Kant's complete works have to be lugged, when they arrive in Paris, from Customs to his lodging. And as the few examples just given may indicate, to the phys ical efforts to gain access to the work he deems important there corres ponds an irrepressible linguistic verve.
Beckett is rarely more inventive than when writing about other writers, especially when insulting them. Nor do the efforts in language stop there. Geulincx's work is unavailable in translation, and so the determined reader works his Latin up to a suitable level to tackle him in the original. He reads Kant and Goethe in German, Dante, Ariosto and D'Annunzio in Italian, Proust of course in French, and efforts are made in Spanish that will later permit him to translate an anthology of Mexican poetry. Of course, one might remark that even as he was fleeing his one surefire career path, as a university professor, the ingrained scholarly habits remained. But such a remark only begs the question, when his polymathic drives were anything but obvious to a man of his family background or cultural milieu. Certainly, there are local satisfactions to be drawn from reading, along with the whips for self-punishment and the squibs to throw at the feet of rivals. In Schopenhauer, Beckett finds "an intellectual justification of unhappi ness - the greatest that has ever been attempted. "68 A French trans lation of The Odyssey offers "something of the old childish absorption with which I read Treasure Island & Oliver Twist and many others. "69 He is "enchanted with Joseph Andrews," which is "Jacques and the Vicar of W. in one. "70 Sainte-Beuve offers "the most interesting mind of the whole galere. "71 Somewhat surprisingly, "the divine Jane [ . . . ] has much to teach me. "72 And, less surprisingly, Sade's Les cent-vingtjoumees de Sodome, whose "composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante's," inspires in him "a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. "73 Yet no amount of local satisfaction, even when it rises to enchantment or ecstasy, quite accounts for the sense one gathers from the letters, that Beckett is
68 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday [c. 18 July 1930 to 25 July 1930].
69 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [c. 22 September 1931].
70 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 October 1932.
71 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 December [1932]. "Galere" (crew).
72 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935J.
73 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 21 February 1938.
lxxxviii
following a rigorously demanding linguistic and literary curriculum, devised by the writer he had not yet become - and in defiance of precisely this same writer.
It may be in the context of such a tension informing literary practice - be it writing or reading - that Beckett's dreams of an escape which would eradicate for ever any such problem should be understood. Yes! If he were to throw in the word-towel, give it all up, and become - what? Even as late as aged thirty, in 1936, he can be dreaming of a flight from the literary which is staggeringly literal: "I think the next little bit of excitement is flying," he writes to McGreevy; "I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. " The reasons for grasping at employment are never more clearly expressed than here: "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. "74 That Beckett never viewed his work in words as a lofty or romantic vocation leaps out from nearly every letter. That he viewed it not even as an honest career is only slightly less evident, perhaps because this view is overshadowed by his family's stronger, even outraged, conviction of the same. And so it is that the idea of a "real job" gives rise to: Beckett the trainee filmmaker laboring under Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow; Beckett the advertising agent at work in London; Beckett the assistant in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square; Beckett the Harvard lecturer, the Cape Town lecturer, the Milan lecturer; Beckett the translator for an international organization in Geneva; Beckett the teacher of French in a technical school in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia; and even more fancifully, Beckett the instructor of Princess Elizabeth "in the Florentine positions. "75
Letters are the vehicles for the requests and applications to these other lives, countries, cities, destinations. Hence they may be, for Beckett, the purveyors of deception, for who is he to pretend to expertise in anything, even in literature and languages - especially in literature and languages. Letters are, it gradually becomes clear, not just the means, but also the end, by which the blocked road of the present becomes, in writing, the uncluttered highway of a future. They permit their writer to imagine
Introduction to Volume I
74 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 July [1936]. 75 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
lxxxix
Introduction to Volume I
himselfin other roles and lives, and to describe these new characters and
their plots to his friends. And they do so while permitting their absurdity
to become transparent. Shortly after he has given up "this grotesque
comedy oflecturing" at Trinity College Dublin, to his parents' everlasting
76
Nowhere does the ambivalence informing that slip of the pen take firmer root than in the ground which Beckett treads throughout this period, the home turf. Behind the idea ofjoining the family business at Clare Street in Dublin lies a whole fantasy offitting in, following in his father's footsteps, belonging. When his brother Frank enters the family business in 1930, the fantasy only quickens. "I wonder would my Father take me into his office," he writes to McGreevy in 1932, "That is what Frank did. "79 The endorsement ofgenealogy which settling in Dublin represents becomes only the more urgent when his father dies in 1933: "I can't write about him," he tells McGreevy shortly after, "I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him. "80 The fact that he can always undo his own idea - "There is no room for another clerk in the office, and even ifthere were I simply could not do the work" - does little to stanch theguiltfeltbeforehisfamily. 81 Thefactthat,ifFrankweretowelcome him into the office, "my present saliva would bum a hole in the enve lope" - this counter-perception does little to slow regression toward the nostalgic idyll. 82 This last - because first - resort is pungent with prema ture resignation, with dejected posturing in cardigan and slippers, the bottle ofstout by the fire; thick with a voluptuousness ofself-pity at the homme moyen sensuel he suspects he is becoming, in an Ireland from which escape is no longer thinkable: "I feel now that I shall meet the most ofmy days from now on here and in tolerable content, not feeling much guilt at
76 SB to Charles Prentice, 27 October 1930.
77 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 November 1932.
78 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 June 1936 [for 1937]. "Verschreiben" (Ger. , slip of the pen).
79 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
80 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 July 1933.
81 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932].
82 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
XC
dismay,
equipoised so perfectly the pros & cons that as usual I found myself constrained to do nothing. "77 To the organization in Geneva he replies, "asking for particulars, but forgot to sign the letter. " He does not fail to draw his conclusion: "a nice example ofVerschreiben. "78
a job in Bulawayo tempts, "but a few minutes consideration
Introduction to Volume I making the most of what ease there is to be had and not bothering very
much about effort. "83
When, in the winter of 1937 to 1938, escape from Ireland does happen, itisdescribedas"likecomingoutofgaolinApril. "84 Onthewallofhis room where he has taken temporary lodging, in the Hotel Liberia in Paris, Beckett sees confirmation of the release achieved: "A sunlit sur face yesterday," he writes to McGreevy, "brighter than the whole of Ireland's summer. "85 The terms are ones which he knows McGreevy will appreciate, so much of their correspondence being concerned with surfaces and light. Beckett's investment in the literary during this period is more than matched by his investment - of energy, of time, of language - in the visual arts, and in painting specifically. With McGreevy, who was already a connoisseur and who would go on to become Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, the investment bears fruit, as Beckett explores a world unbeset by any of the envy or ambivalence pervading the literary. The efforts he makes to study art, to visit galleries and museums, in Ireland, in London, in Paris, most of all in Germany, are unflagging. He spends entire days absorbing painting and learning the artists and traditions, mastering a visual language which he will himself never practice. And he does so with one eye ever on the possibilities of the present, possibilities clearer to him in this domain than in the literary. Since the primary appeal of Beckett's work is so often to the ear rather than to the eye, it might be easy to neglect what an exceptionally acute and well-trained eye he possessed. The letters reveal that eye as it roves, as it trains itself, as it probes, absorbs, quizzes, rejects, and is ravished. It is not until he corresponds with the art historian and critic Georges Duthuit, in letters which form the basis of the Three Dialogues published in 1948 (and which provide the backbone to Volume II of the present edition), that anything approach ing a manifesto of the possible and significant in art of the present will be extracted from him. But these dialogues are dependent upon the prior exchanges with McGreevy, exchanges in which it is less the range of knowledge deployed which is remarkable than the immensity of the
83 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 April 1937. "Homme moyen sensuel" (average man with average tastes and appetites).
84 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 December 1937.
85 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 27 January 1938.
xci
Introduction to Volume I
curiosity displayed. Once again, Beckett is pursuing his own arduous curriculum, one which takes him away from the literary, but from which he is convinced the literary must learn.
Beckett's letters testify to an extraordinary visual memory, largely unassisted by the technical supports ofphotographs or reproductions. "I remember the Bassano in Hampton Court very well," he tells McGreevy; "In the second or third room, isn't it? The wild tormented colour. "86 His memory is such that he challenges established attribu tions - and several ofhis re-attributions have been vindicated by sub sequent catalogues. "I had forgotten the little Fabritius," he writes to McGreevy after a further visit to the Louvre, "A very slapdash attribu tion. More like a Flinck. "87 He refuses to believe that a small portrait ofa head in Ireland's National Gallery is a Velazquez (though he is much less certain about how to spell this painter's name). He advises his friend Arland Ussher, on the basis of a poor photograph, as to the possible attribution of a painting which Ussher has purchased: "As a decorative statement ofweights & tensions," he writes, "it seems to me to lack only technique & bravura to pair up with the easel recreations of Gianbattista [for Giambattista] Tiepolo & Sons. "88 He compiles for McGreevy exhaustive lists of the works he views during his tour of Germany, and even as he claims that "there is really not much point writing like this about the pictures," he "can't stop without mentioning the Poussin Venus. Beyond praise & appraisement. "89 He reports to McGreevy on the career ofGeorge Furlong, who is appointed Director oflreland's National Gallery in 1935, with a highly critical gaze, mock ing his lapses of taste in acquisitions, and ending by condemning his entire aesthetic policy: "It is time someone put him in mind of the purpose of a picture gallery, to provide pictures worth looking at and the possibility ofseeing them. "90 And he does this, characteristically, while all the time claiming that: 'Tm afraid I couldn't write about pictures at all. I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but now that need is gone. "91
86 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 March 1937.
87 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 April 1938.
88 SB to Arland Ussher, 14 June [1939].
89 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 16 February 1937.
90 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
91 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1936.
xcii
Introduction to Volume I
Though the previously published and by now famous 1937 "German
Letter" to Axel Kaun uses Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to sketch a
possibility for literature, and though the letters do contain some fasci
nating insights into music - and into ballet and film as well - it is in
painting that Beckett most commonly intuits directions in which he
92
and in a request to McGreevy that he "forgive the degueulade. "93 What is glimpsed in Cezanne is more fully grasped in the work ofthe artist who will elicit from Beckett something as close as he comes at this stage to a fully fledged theory. Perhaps it is the very excitement at locating the artistic horizon so nearby, in the work ofan approachable compatriot, that leads him to find so many excuses not to accept Jack Yeats's repeated invitation to visit his studio during his "at-homes. " "Set out on Saturday afternoon to see Jack Yeats," he tells McGreevy, "and then en route changed my mind. "94 Yeats stirs in Beckett a rare acquis itive instinct, until the young unemployed writer is able to scrape together the cash to put down a deposit on a painting, Morning. As with Cezanne, it is the "ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness" that fascinates Beckett, and the sense in Yeats's painting of "the con vention & performance oflove & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken" having been "suddenly suspended. " Yeats leads Beckett to a "perception & dispassion" which, in contrast to what he finds in Watteau (to whom he likens Yeats), is "beyond tragedy. " Even as one resists the temptation to find countless adumbrations ofBeckett's later work in the letters, it is hard not to hear harbingers ofthe tone and vision that will become "Beckettian," when he writes: "the way he puts down a man's head & a woman's head side by side, or face to face, is
92 SB to Axel Kaun, 9 July 1937.
93 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934. "Degueulade" (throwing up). 94 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932].
xciii
In the work of Cezanne, first, Beckett sights - or sites - an all-important representation ofthe other ness ofthe world, "incommensurable with all human expressions what soever. " The "deanthropomorphizations of the artist" are the more precious in Cezanne's portraits, where the individual subject becomes "incapable ofloving or hating anyone but himselfor ofbeing loved or hated by anyone but himself'; a claim which Beckett immediately and doubly undermines, as ifhe had seen too much or reached too far, by signing off his letter in a firm rejection ofsolipsism - "God love thee" -
believes writing should be heading.
Introduction to Volume I
terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. "95 In Yeats's work, nature itself, Ireland's nature, becomes the setting of "the ultimate inorganism of everything. " And again the future looms, the theatrical work for which Beckett will be most cele brated, in the metaphor he uses to describe Ireland here: "a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. "96 When, in 1938, return ing to Ireland after a prolonged absence, he visits Yeats's studio and sees his "magnificent new picture," entitled Helen, he rediscovers the "same extraordinary tenderness & distinction of handling," and beyond that, "depth and a courage more than of conviction, of certainty, absolutely natural & unrhetorical. " He rediscovers the very sense of necessity that years previously he located in Homer and Dante, the sense of art as a physical extension of the self, an art which is as natural as breathing. Unable to produce his own art to match, Beckett the viewer none the less absorbs the impact: "I was really knocked all ofa heap. "97
If art hits, and must hit, the body, this is because it must emerge
from the body to begin with, if it is to be necessary. For the greats, this
may be as easy as breathing; for the remainder, which includes Beckett
himself, whose writing emerges "above an abscess and not out of a
cavity," the somatic impetus is less unambiguously life-sustaining or
98
95 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 ! August 1937].
96 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937.
97 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday 14 August 1938].
98 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
99 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1937 [for 1936].
100 SB to Thomas McGreevy.
lxx
Permission to publish has also been granted by the following owners ofletters, manuscripts, and other documents: Klaus Albrecht; Archives nationales, Paris; The Beckett International Foundation, Reading University; Trustees of The British Museum; The Poetry Collection, State University ofNew York at Buffalo; University ofCape Town; The Chatto and Windus Archives at Reading University; Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Private Collection ofNuala Costello; Dartmouth College Library; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Association Les Amis de Jeanne et Otto Freundlich; Peter Gidal, London; David Hone; The Lilly Library, Indiana University; Department ofSpecial Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University ofKansas; Private Collection ofDr. Katarina Kautsky, nee Sauerlandt; Northwestern University Library; Berg Collection ofEnglish and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Princeton University Library; Archives Jacques Putman, Paris; Tatiana Goryaeva, Director, Rossijsky Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (RGALI; Russian State Archive ofLiterature and Art); Morris Sinclair; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University ofTexas at Austin; The Board ofTrinity College Dublin; Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Hans E. Janke Bequest.
Permissions
lxxi
AN AUP BIF
BM
Burns Library
CtY
DeU ENS GN HK ICSo ICU
IEN IMEC
InU KF KU
MBA MOMA
lxxii
Archives nationales, Paris
The American University of Paris
Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading
British Museum, London
John J. Burns Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Boston College
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
University of Delaware Library, Newark Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris Germanisches Nationalmuseum Niirnberg Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Institut memoires de ! 'edition contemporaine, Paris-Caen
The Lilly Library, Indiana University
Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin
Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasburg
Museum of Modern Art, New York
ABBREVIATIONS
LIBRARY, MUSEUM, AND INSTITUTIONAL ABBREVIATIONS
NBuU
NGB NGI NGL NhD
NjP
NLI
NNC, RBML
NPG
NYPL, Berg OkTIJ
RHA RTE TCD
TxU UoR
Albrecht Costello Gidal Sinclair
The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
National Gallery oflreland
National Gallery, London
Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College
Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: Princeton University Library
National Library oflreland
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
National Portrait Gallery, London
New York Public Library, Berg Collection Department of Special Collections, Mcfarlin Library, University ofTulsa, Oklahoma
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
Radio Telefis Eireann
Manuscript Room, Trinity College Dublin Library, when used with reference to manuscript identification; in other instances, a short form for Trinity College Dublin Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin Department ofSpecial Collections, University of Reading
List ofabbreviations
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Private collection of Klaus Albrecht
Private collection of Nuala Costello
Private collection ofPeter Gidal, Index Books Private collection ofMorris Sinclair
lxxiii
List of abbreviations
AvW GD
NRF
OED Pyle
SBT/A
b.
C.
d.
f.
fl. [illeg] ins
ACI ACS
AH
AL draft ALI
ALS AMS AN
lxxiv
ABBREVIATIONS FOR PUBLICATIONS, MANUSCRIPTS, AND TRANSLATORS
Adolf von Baden-Wurttemberg
Samuel Beckett's German Diaries, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading Library
Nouvelle Revue Frani;aise
Oxford English Dictionary, second electronic edition Refers to numbers assigned to paintings by Jack B. Yeats in Hilary Pyle. Jack B. Yeats: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings (London: Andre Deutsch, 1992) 3 vols. , and Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993)
Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui
EDITORIAL ABBREVIATIONS
born
circa
died
folio
flourished
illegible word, words inserted
m.
n. d. pseud. s/
?
< >
with date of marriage or to indicate married name
no date
pseudonym signed uncertain cancelation
ABBREVIATIONS IN BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
autograph card initialed autograph card signed another hand
autograph letter draft autograph letter initialed autograph letter signed autograph manuscript autograph note
pm
List ofabbreviations
ANI autograph note initialed ANS autograph note signed
APCI autograph postcard initialed APCS autograph postcard signed APS autograph postscript
env envelope
illeg illegible
imprinted imprinted with SB's name letterhead imprinted letterhead
postmark Pneu pneumatique
PS postscript
TLC typed letter copy
TLcc typed letter carbon copy TLdraft typed letter draft
TLI typed letter initialed TIS typed letter signed
TMS typed manuscript
TPCI typed postcard initialed TPCS typed postcard signed TPS typed postscript
lxxv
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
"I find it more & more difficult to write, even letters to my friends. " So wrote Samuel Beckett in 1936 to Tom McGreevy, his chief correspond
1
Although Beckett claims in various ways that he hates letters, his sixty years of letters, taken as a whole, number more than fifteen thousand, and form one of the great literary correspondences of the twentieth century. No special pleading need be made as to the impor tance of even perfunctory letters from the hand of a writer as important as Beckett. Yet what will strike the reader is the fact that Beckett seldom writes perfunctory letters. Even when responding in haste, even when
ent for the period represented here, 1929 to 1940. The difficulty of writing letters is not the only one of which the young Beckett com plains, nor is it even the most acute. "I can't read, write, drink, think, feel, or move," he tells his friend Mary Manning Howe, while making his lonely tour round Germany's art treasures; "I seem impelled to address my friends when least in a condition to. "2 Immobility, impos sibility, illness, and impasse: across a human landscape populated by negation, doubt, refusal, and retreat, the letters collected here cut their way, making connections, opening possibilities, courting half-chances, chastising indifference. During this period, letters matter inordinately to Beckett. They are often his sole means of connection: to places where he is not, to people with whom he cannot converse directly, to others with whom he would not wish to converse directly. Letters are a chan nel to possible selves, selves ofwhich he is as yet only dimly aware, even to selves he would deny. Letters make possible a writing, a voice per haps, which his more public work does not yet dare to deploy.
1 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 19316].
2 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936.
lxxvii
Introduction to Volume I
penning a note on the back of a postcard, even when appealing from deep distress, Beckett is an extraordinarily painstaking and careful correspondent. In later years, especially after Waiting for Godot brings its author unexpected celebrity, the quantity of letters which his con scientiousness obliges him to write increases significantly - for him, alarmingly. And as the man becomes a public figure, however reluc tantly, their nature changes too, becoming in large part reactive: responses to requests for information from academics, for permissions from directors, for interpretations from translators, for advice from producers, for schedules from publishers. Here, in the early years, the letters are fewer, but they matter all the more, sent as they are into an epistolary space about which little can be assumed. The early letters convey information nearly always as a secondary function, their pri mary role being that of establishing a relation - by requesting, stirring, provoking, even outraging if necessary. The interest of the recipient is not always assured, often has to be stimulated and then maintained - and this, when what Beckett has to offer is usually far from conven tional or easily palatable.
Biography has an almost ineluctable tendency to make an individu al's greatness seem predestined. The individual's letters, if that individ ual is as lucid in his hesitations and ambivalences as Beckett, serve to restore the uncertainty informing the choices, the dilemmas and daily doubt which might at any point have compelled desertion of the cause or defection to some camp of lesser achievement. Beckett's letters reveal the compromises as well as the bold refusals, the longing for recognition as well as the revulsion at publicity, the numerous false paths almost taken as well as the inner conviction that only one path - the literary - is truly worth following.
Before being one of communication, the job of a letter is, then, to establish common terms between the writer and the recipient (whom the French language helpfully names the destinataire): to create some complicity or solidarity between aspirant and respondent; and to do so beyond the immediate social, geographical, professional, even intellec tual, environs which might otherwise have fostered less deferred or indirect verbal exchange. In doing so the letters permit - or permitted, since one ofthe things which adds to the value ofthis correspondence is that it is hard to imagine there ever arising a twenty-first-century equivalent - an intimacy which is both magnified and diminished,
lxxviii
Introduction to Volume I
both accelerated and delayed, with respect to what could be expected or achieved in conversation. For Beckett, however, the complicity which he is seeking in his letters is also one of which he is acutely wary; he is strongly suspicious of the demand implicit in solidarity; and he is almost cripplingly aware of the extreme constraints forever placed upon intimacy, not least when that intimacy is formed or sustained by the self-consciousness and control which letters permit, with their possibilities of revision and self-censorship. It may be partly in this sense that his "hatred" of letters is to be understood. For Beckett, merely to write, and then release, a letter during this period implies a sort of self-overcoming, a provisional acceptance of community when, as he puts it, "all groups are horrible";3 a climb down from the solitary self-sufficiency to which he aspires, whether he does so as self laceration or as self-aggrandizement (nobody loves me / the world does not deserve me). More simply, letters take their author out of himself. they take him elsewhere. They do this, when the desire to be freed from self, to be elsewhere, is itself being critically appraised by Beckett as one ofthe primary ruses for evasion oftruth and desertion of any putative literary vocation.
The restlessness which Beckett experiences during this period allows him to settle only briefly, and he is almost constantly on the move, between Dublin, London, and Paris, taking in Germany too on several occasions, opting finally for Paris in late 1937, just in time to move again in 1940, although by forces largely beyond his control. The danger in all such physical displacements is clear to him. Writing to Tom McGreevy from Germany in 1936, it is expressed as a question: "Was it then another journey from, like so many? "4 Then, as a confession, he writes to Mary Manning Howe, from the tail-end ofhis German sojourn: "It has turned out indeed to be a journey from, and not to, as I knew it was, before I began it. "5 Thejourneyfrom: when thosejourneys which are letters are equally haunted by the suspicion that they are serving as flight. They are haunted despite the fact that they are incontrovertibly to, letters destined to indeed - and not just to anyone. In their wonderful variety, Beckett's letters are written to appeal to the unique sensibilities and language-possibilities of their particular reader.
34
SB to Thomas McGreevy. 6 June 1939. SB to Thomas McGreevy, 9 October 1936. 5 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 13 December 1936.
lxxix
Introduction to Volume I
The letters collected in this volume attest to a loneliness deriving from a lack of much more than mere companionship. But even as they attest to this lack, they also attenuate it. Wherever Beckett is, he can also be elsewhere, even when on the road. His letters trace out an alternative reality for their writer, and help him to sustain himself, almost as in a spider's web of his own weaving, wherever he is living - and failing fully to live. Of course, for the letter's journey to be successful, for the else wheres to serve their function, these must be invested with affect, whether of desire, ambition, anger, or the longing for recognition. Every recipient must represent some alternative, if not of place or of feeling then of possibility, as in the numerous letters to agents and publishers, letters written reluctantly and with a sinking heart, but in the knowledge that without them his work will remain unknown and his options will only narrow further.
Feeling and possibility may yet meet, and when they do, as in the
great letters to McGreevy, a writing emerges which is quite as exciting
as anything Beckett is achieving with a view to publication. Even to
McGreevy, Beckett can be reticent: he writes to him in French when he
wishes to avoid the risk of being over-read; he scarcely discusses with
him the details of his sexual life, barely mentioning, for example, that
he has "seen quite a lot" of Peggy Guggenheim in 1938; and he tells him
on occasion that he prefers to discuss certain private matters with him
6
inperson. YettoMcGreevy,astoafewselectothers,heopenssome thing perhaps more important than any details of the life lived or the works completed. He opens a sense of the life not yet embarked upon, the life only dreamed of, when these will be immersed to saturation in the past and future that are art: music, painting, literature. Being already the Beckett which he perhaps will only later become in his published oeuvre, he must apologize, even when issuing insights of incalculable value, for a "miserable letter,''7 for "this futile and not even melancholy letter,"8 for "a very white kind of letter,"9 for "this Jeremiad. " 10 But being already, here in his letters, the Beckett who can allow a writing to emerge which is born of vulnerability and release, he
6 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 5 January 1938.
7 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
8 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 24 February 1931.
9 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 November [for 3 November 1932].
10 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
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Introduction to Volume I
can also admit that 'Tm not ashamed to stutter like this with you who are used to my wild way of failing to say whatl imagine I want to say and who understand that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must stutter or rest. And it needs a more stoical mouth than mine to rest. " 11
The authorized biography of Samuel Beckett, by James Knowlson, bears the title, Damned to Fame (1996). Certainly, Beckett was amazed and often dismayed by the popularity his work gained during the last thirty years of his life. As we have suggested above, this popularity had a direct impact on Beckett the correspondent, dramatically increasing the num ber and considerably altering the nature ofthe letters he wrote. Yet what is striking about Beckett before the years of "fame," is how wary he was ofthe public dimension ofthe arts, even as he was attempting to gain this dimension for himselfand his work. Nowhere is this more patent than in his dealings with publishers. Here, his wariness turns often into a disdain or hostility which is all the more notable in that his principal interloc utors at publishing houses or journals tend to be intelligent, patient, learned, supportive, and gentlemanly: men such as his publisher Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus, a figure almost unimaginable in the cut and thrust of today's trade publishing world. "Truck direct with publish ers," writes Beckett in 1936 when such "truck" is still largely a fantasy, "is one of the few avoidable degradations. " 12 For Beckett, merely attempting to be published is cursed as "creeping and crawling and sollicitation [sic],"13 tantamount to transporting "a load of manure or a ton of bricks"14 to "literary garbage buckets. "15 A six-week delay in response from a certain Rupert Grayson sparks a rare paranoid reaction in which the usual self-deprecation turns into self-inflation, as Beckett worries that: "I have an idea he may try and do the dirty. He has no background and I have nothing to show that he has any ofmy property. "16 In rage, the same day, he writes to George Reavey, one of whose roles it was to mediate his relations with the presses: "Grayson has lost it or cleaned
11 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
12 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
13 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 18 ! August 1932].
14 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 1 March 1930.
15 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday I? summer 1929].
16 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 8 October 1932.
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Introduction to Volume I
himself with it. Kick his balls off. "17 Reavey, who fills the role of agent while helping Beckett in many other ways, is the object of the greatest swings of mood and judgment during these years, as Beckett goes from soliciting him to reviling him to needing him, from shunning him to recommending him to his friends. "I neither trust him nor like him," he writes in 1936, "but know no other agent. "18 Things deteriorate when Reavey publishes a Beckett text without its author's permission, to the point where Beckett writes to Reavey a letter so scathing that this per haps explains why it no longer exists; though its content may be recon structed from a letter Beckett writes to McGreevy, in which Reavey is described as: "(1) A liar (2) A clumsy Sophist (3) An illiterate. "19 Within a month, however, Beckett writes, "I extended the little finger of reconci liation to G. R. ";20 and some short time after that he is content once more to be "dumping the work on Reavey. "21
The temptation is ever present, for Beckett, to abandon the effort to diffuse the work beyond the closest circle of friends. But this tempta tion is weak compared to the pressure coming from another source, which Beckett believes can be relieved only by its receiving public recognition. "I dread going home with nothing cut & dried to do," he writes to McGreevy from Germany in 1937: "Proofs & a publication would carry me over till I could get away again. "22 He writes of his mother, that she "supposes I am brimming over with material for books 1 . . . ] anything rather than desoeuvrement. "23 Publishers and their acceptance become the propitiatory flag which he hopes to wave at his exasperated family members, who are in a state of incomprehen sion as to the choices he is making and refusing to make in his life. That the flag is never large enough or appropriately marked, that the public recognition does not arrive in time or from the appropriate quarters, remains one of the major disappointments of Beckett's life.
When approval does come, from as valued a reader as McGreevy, Beckett's joy, if short-lived, is unequivocal. When he learns of his
17 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932.
18 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
19 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 27 June 1936.
20 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 26 July [1936).
21 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
22 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 16 February 1937.
23 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 20 February [1935). "Desoeuvrement" (having nothing
todo).
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Introduction to Volume I
friend's favorable judgment ofthe manuscript ofMurphy, he responds: "I need not tell you I was delighted with your letter. I was afraid you would not like it much at all. I find the people all so hateful myself, even Celia, that to have you find them lovable surprises and delights me. "24 Much more common than approval, however, are misprision and rejection, when the skin is never thick enough for these not to hurt. Beckett's brother asks him, '"Why can't you write the way people want"';25 this question is repeated, in more euphemistic terms, by nearly every publisher he encounters. Rejection is accompanied by "the usual kind words,"26 by "honeyed regrets,"27 or by "the classical obeisance et l'obligeance prophetique. "28 Or it comes bluntly: "Heard from Frere-Reeves yesterday, a curt rejection. 'On commercial grounds we could not justify it in our list. ' And ofcourse what other grounds of justification could there be. "29 Some revenge can be wrought, through mockery of "Shatton & Windup" or "The Hogarth Private Lunatic Asylum,"30 or through a limerick penned at the expense of Doubleday Doran. 31 But this revenge is slight when compared to the need: "The chiefthing is to get the book OUf. "32
The willingness ofthe young author to offer words ofcompromise in order to facilitate publication may surprise readers familiar only with the intransigence ofan older Beckett. In response to a publisher's wish for cuts in Murphy, he writes to Reavey: "I should be willing to suppress such passages as are not essential to the whole and adjust such others as seem to them a confusion ofthe issue"; the admonishment to Reavey which follows is an agent's nightmare: "Be astonished, firm, & up to a point politely flexible, all at once, ifyou can. "33 Not surprisingly, the negotiation proves unfruitful, although, with a desperation almost as audible as the irony, Beckett would write: "The last I remember is my
24 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 July 1936.
25 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
26 SBtoThomasMcGreevy,9October1936.
27 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July 11936].
28 SB to George Reavey, 23 February 1937. "Obligeance prophetique" (prophetic
obligingness).
29 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
30 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. And again to Reavey, 27 December 1936.
31 SB to George Reavey, 4 August 1937.
32 SB to George Reavey, 27 December 1936.
33 SB to George Reavey, 13 November 1936.
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Introduction to Volume I
readiness to cut down the work to its title. I am now prepared to go further, and change the title if it gives offence, to Quigley, Trompetenschleim, Eliot, or any other name that the publishers fancy. "34 When finally, thanks in part to the intercession of McGreevy and the painter and writer Jack B. Yeats, Routledge makes an offer on Murphy, Beckett writes, "I would sign anything to get the book out";35 a tractability which asks to be weighed alongside the apparently contradictory, but perhaps equally true, assertion: "I feel even less about its being taken than I did when it was rejected. "36
Indifference on the part of the world, or rejection from the public realm, corresponds so closely - so much more closely than success - to what is being experienced internally, that it provokes instant recogni tion. Defeat before the act, before the writing, will become the very ground of Beckett's imaginative world. Here, already, it gives rise to a plethora of confessions. To McGreevy, of his essay on Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, he writes, "I can't start the Proust. "37 This matures into "I have not put pen to paper on Proust";38 which becomes "You know I can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture";39 followed by "I can't write anything at all, can't imagine even the shape of a sentence";40 leading to "I haven't tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous. "41 Yet somehow his Proust does get written, and he even feels some pride in it, before this is overtaken by distaste at what he judges to be "very grey & disgustingly
juvenile,"42 "a merely critical extension [ . . . J blafard, gritty like the
43
ing," critical writing comes in for very harsh censure:44 "dishonest & surfait" is how he describes his review of Jack Yeats's novel The
34 SB to George Reavey. 20 December 1936. "Trompetenschleim" (Ger. , numpetslime).
35 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
36 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 22 December 1937.
37 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday [? 17 July 1930].
38 SB to Thomas McGreevy, [before 5 August 1930].
39 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 January 1931.
40 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
41 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
42 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 February 1931.
43 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931. '"Blafard" (wan).
44 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
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---
Civic Guard's anus. "
Having been relegated, in this period, to what he calls "slopempty
Introduction to Volume I
Amaranthers. 4s But the judgment meted out to his poetry and fiction is only slightly more generous. "Fake" is a word he uses freely of his own
47
. . o down before the brain knows of grit in the wind. s
The gap between the self which writes and the self which reads can be as much of an affliction as a solace. Yet there is, despite asseverations to the contrary, no shortage of reading done during these years. It is tempting to invoke a notion like "apprenticeship" in this context, and certainly the later Beckett oeuvre is inconceivable without the mass of books consumed during this period. Yet, if apprentice Beckett is, not least to the writer who acts as his mentor and guide during much of the period, James Joyce, then he is one who feels he is not so much learning a trade as failing to gain initiation into a sect.
He fears that the very knowledge he is accruing may itself be ruining his future chances, turning him into a "Sorbonagre," leading him to a spurious realm of knowingness. st "Ifl am not careful," he writes, after he has found in some German novels a new justification for a figure from Murphy,
45 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July [1936].
46 See, for example, SB to Thomas McGreevy, Saturday [3 September 1932[, quoted in
SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932], n. 4.
47 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935. "Involontairement" (involuntarily).
48 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 23 May [1936[.
49 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 9 June 1936.
50 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932. "Facultatif' (optional); "pendu" (hanged
work,
"involontairement trivial";
46
or "really a most unsavoury & not very honest work," as he writes of the first draft of Murphy48 - "It reads something horrid. "49 Nowhere does he express more eloquently what he feels to be lacking in his writing than in a letter to McGreevy from 1932, where he berates himself for its lack of necessity. "Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud" - these become the whips with which to punish the literary self whose productions are never anything better than "trigged up" or "facultatif. " His own writing lacks the urgency and inevitability which for him distinguish work that is true, which must be as instinctive and automatic as a physical reflex, and which he describes memorably, in an expression that will echo through his whole writing life: 'Tm in mourning for the integrity of a pendu's emission of semen [ . . . ] the integrity of the eyelids coming
man).
51 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931.
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Introduction to Volume I
"I shall become clear as to what I have written. "52 It is not just that an
ever-increased awareness of literary heritage furnishes the aspiring
writer with a yardstick of personal unworthiness; it is that the partic
ular sort of success which writing constitutes is already perceived to be
achievable only in a sort of blind or spastic incomprehension. "Jenseit
der Spekulation kommt erst der Mensch in sein Eden" (Only beyond
speculation does man reach his Eden), he writes in 1934 to his cousin
53
Fortunately perhaps, not every writer's work which Beckett encounters during this period strikes him as being as necessary as that of Homer or Dante. "I have been reading wildly all over the place," he tells McGreevy in 1936, "Goethe's Iphigenia & then Racine's to remove the taste. "57 Beckett's reading may not be wild, but diverse it certainly is, as even a partial list of authors absorbed will make abundantly clear: Ariosto, Aristotle, Jane Austen, D'Annunzio, Darwin, Diderot, George Eliot, Fielding, Geulincx, Grillparzer, Guarini, Holderlin, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Kant, Keats, Lawrence, Leibniz, Melville, Plato, T. F. Powys, Ramuz, Jules Renard, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Sade, Sainte-Beuve, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Sterne, Tasso, Vigny. Few invite quite the excor iation that Goethe's Tasso receives, yet the view which Beckett forms of
52 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
53 SB to Morris Sinclair, 5 May 1934. 54 SB to Samuel Putnam, 28 June 1932.
55 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935.
56 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
57 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 March 1936.
lxxxvi
Though only later will he formulate this idea fully, in the letters to Georges Duthuit from after World War II, the awareness is already present here of the enticements and traps of knowledge. The remark he makes to Samuel Putnam, as early as 1932, concerning his indebtedness to James Joyce, that "I vow I will get over J. J. ere I die," is justthethinendofthewriter'suncomfortablewedge. 54 Littlewonder that he is delighted to report to McGreevy in 1935 a remark made to him by Nuala Costello: '"You haven't a good word to say for anyone but the failures. "'55 For writing, ifit is to matter, must constitute itselfas a sort of shedding, a venturing out with no clear landmarks, not even when these are literary, and with no sure hope of return: "when to have ever left one's village ceases to seem a folly," he writes to Mary Manning Howe in 1937, "perhaps it is only then that the writing begins. "56
Morris Sinclair.
this work may stand for the many among the canonical greats - Darwin·s The Origin ofSpedes is "badly written catlap"58 - which he dismisses: "He really invites one very patiently to think of him as a machine a mots, a cliche separator, & a bunker of the suffering that has not proved its merit in a thousand impressions, or a vademecum edition. "59 And the dead fare better than the living. It is for his contemporaries that Beckett reserves his most hostile fire, ignited as this is by a mix ofgenuine contempt and barely admissible envy. Beckett calls T. F. Powys's writing "a fabricated darkness & painfully organised unified tragic completeness. . . Go D'Annunzio has a "dirty juicy squelchy mind, bleeding and bursting, like his celebrated pomegranates. "G1 Aldous Huxley's latest offering does not even merit reiteration of its title, becoming "Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work. "G2 Lawrence trades in a "tedious kindling of damp. "G3 T. S. Eliot's essay on Dante is "insufferably condescending, restrained & professo rial. "G4 And Proust too comes in for rough treatment, much rougher in the letters than in the essay on his work, his prose being deemed "more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst," and his loquacity being judged "certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore's, but no less profuse, a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. . . Gs
Little wonder that the prospect of having to read Proust, or of having, as Beckett puts it, "to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes," is far from charming. GG Yet for the Proust to be written, Proust must be read, and not once but twice, in an infuriatingly inadequate edition. More than the exasperation, louder than the condemnations, stronger than the disgust and the envy, what informs Beckett's reading, as it does his writing in his letters about his reading, is its energy. When he wishes to read the work of Arnold Geulincx, "without knowing why exactly,"G7
58 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
59 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936. "Machine a mots" (word machine).
60 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
61 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 July 1930 [for 7 August 1930].
62 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
63 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [7 August 1934].
64 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1937.
65 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
66 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
67 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
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Introduction to Volume I
Introduction to Volume I
he forces himself into the library at Trinity College in Dublin, which he has compelling reasons to wish to avoid, day after day. Kant's complete works have to be lugged, when they arrive in Paris, from Customs to his lodging. And as the few examples just given may indicate, to the phys ical efforts to gain access to the work he deems important there corres ponds an irrepressible linguistic verve.
Beckett is rarely more inventive than when writing about other writers, especially when insulting them. Nor do the efforts in language stop there. Geulincx's work is unavailable in translation, and so the determined reader works his Latin up to a suitable level to tackle him in the original. He reads Kant and Goethe in German, Dante, Ariosto and D'Annunzio in Italian, Proust of course in French, and efforts are made in Spanish that will later permit him to translate an anthology of Mexican poetry. Of course, one might remark that even as he was fleeing his one surefire career path, as a university professor, the ingrained scholarly habits remained. But such a remark only begs the question, when his polymathic drives were anything but obvious to a man of his family background or cultural milieu. Certainly, there are local satisfactions to be drawn from reading, along with the whips for self-punishment and the squibs to throw at the feet of rivals. In Schopenhauer, Beckett finds "an intellectual justification of unhappi ness - the greatest that has ever been attempted. "68 A French trans lation of The Odyssey offers "something of the old childish absorption with which I read Treasure Island & Oliver Twist and many others. "69 He is "enchanted with Joseph Andrews," which is "Jacques and the Vicar of W. in one. "70 Sainte-Beuve offers "the most interesting mind of the whole galere. "71 Somewhat surprisingly, "the divine Jane [ . . . ] has much to teach me. "72 And, less surprisingly, Sade's Les cent-vingtjoumees de Sodome, whose "composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante's," inspires in him "a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. "73 Yet no amount of local satisfaction, even when it rises to enchantment or ecstasy, quite accounts for the sense one gathers from the letters, that Beckett is
68 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday [c. 18 July 1930 to 25 July 1930].
69 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [c. 22 September 1931].
70 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 October 1932.
71 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 December [1932]. "Galere" (crew).
72 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935J.
73 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 21 February 1938.
lxxxviii
following a rigorously demanding linguistic and literary curriculum, devised by the writer he had not yet become - and in defiance of precisely this same writer.
It may be in the context of such a tension informing literary practice - be it writing or reading - that Beckett's dreams of an escape which would eradicate for ever any such problem should be understood. Yes! If he were to throw in the word-towel, give it all up, and become - what? Even as late as aged thirty, in 1936, he can be dreaming of a flight from the literary which is staggeringly literal: "I think the next little bit of excitement is flying," he writes to McGreevy; "I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. " The reasons for grasping at employment are never more clearly expressed than here: "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. "74 That Beckett never viewed his work in words as a lofty or romantic vocation leaps out from nearly every letter. That he viewed it not even as an honest career is only slightly less evident, perhaps because this view is overshadowed by his family's stronger, even outraged, conviction of the same. And so it is that the idea of a "real job" gives rise to: Beckett the trainee filmmaker laboring under Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow; Beckett the advertising agent at work in London; Beckett the assistant in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square; Beckett the Harvard lecturer, the Cape Town lecturer, the Milan lecturer; Beckett the translator for an international organization in Geneva; Beckett the teacher of French in a technical school in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia; and even more fancifully, Beckett the instructor of Princess Elizabeth "in the Florentine positions. "75
Letters are the vehicles for the requests and applications to these other lives, countries, cities, destinations. Hence they may be, for Beckett, the purveyors of deception, for who is he to pretend to expertise in anything, even in literature and languages - especially in literature and languages. Letters are, it gradually becomes clear, not just the means, but also the end, by which the blocked road of the present becomes, in writing, the uncluttered highway of a future. They permit their writer to imagine
Introduction to Volume I
74 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 July [1936]. 75 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
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Introduction to Volume I
himselfin other roles and lives, and to describe these new characters and
their plots to his friends. And they do so while permitting their absurdity
to become transparent. Shortly after he has given up "this grotesque
comedy oflecturing" at Trinity College Dublin, to his parents' everlasting
76
Nowhere does the ambivalence informing that slip of the pen take firmer root than in the ground which Beckett treads throughout this period, the home turf. Behind the idea ofjoining the family business at Clare Street in Dublin lies a whole fantasy offitting in, following in his father's footsteps, belonging. When his brother Frank enters the family business in 1930, the fantasy only quickens. "I wonder would my Father take me into his office," he writes to McGreevy in 1932, "That is what Frank did. "79 The endorsement ofgenealogy which settling in Dublin represents becomes only the more urgent when his father dies in 1933: "I can't write about him," he tells McGreevy shortly after, "I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him. "80 The fact that he can always undo his own idea - "There is no room for another clerk in the office, and even ifthere were I simply could not do the work" - does little to stanch theguiltfeltbeforehisfamily. 81 Thefactthat,ifFrankweretowelcome him into the office, "my present saliva would bum a hole in the enve lope" - this counter-perception does little to slow regression toward the nostalgic idyll. 82 This last - because first - resort is pungent with prema ture resignation, with dejected posturing in cardigan and slippers, the bottle ofstout by the fire; thick with a voluptuousness ofself-pity at the homme moyen sensuel he suspects he is becoming, in an Ireland from which escape is no longer thinkable: "I feel now that I shall meet the most ofmy days from now on here and in tolerable content, not feeling much guilt at
76 SB to Charles Prentice, 27 October 1930.
77 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 November 1932.
78 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 June 1936 [for 1937]. "Verschreiben" (Ger. , slip of the pen).
79 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
80 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 July 1933.
81 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932].
82 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
XC
dismay,
equipoised so perfectly the pros & cons that as usual I found myself constrained to do nothing. "77 To the organization in Geneva he replies, "asking for particulars, but forgot to sign the letter. " He does not fail to draw his conclusion: "a nice example ofVerschreiben. "78
a job in Bulawayo tempts, "but a few minutes consideration
Introduction to Volume I making the most of what ease there is to be had and not bothering very
much about effort. "83
When, in the winter of 1937 to 1938, escape from Ireland does happen, itisdescribedas"likecomingoutofgaolinApril. "84 Onthewallofhis room where he has taken temporary lodging, in the Hotel Liberia in Paris, Beckett sees confirmation of the release achieved: "A sunlit sur face yesterday," he writes to McGreevy, "brighter than the whole of Ireland's summer. "85 The terms are ones which he knows McGreevy will appreciate, so much of their correspondence being concerned with surfaces and light. Beckett's investment in the literary during this period is more than matched by his investment - of energy, of time, of language - in the visual arts, and in painting specifically. With McGreevy, who was already a connoisseur and who would go on to become Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, the investment bears fruit, as Beckett explores a world unbeset by any of the envy or ambivalence pervading the literary. The efforts he makes to study art, to visit galleries and museums, in Ireland, in London, in Paris, most of all in Germany, are unflagging. He spends entire days absorbing painting and learning the artists and traditions, mastering a visual language which he will himself never practice. And he does so with one eye ever on the possibilities of the present, possibilities clearer to him in this domain than in the literary. Since the primary appeal of Beckett's work is so often to the ear rather than to the eye, it might be easy to neglect what an exceptionally acute and well-trained eye he possessed. The letters reveal that eye as it roves, as it trains itself, as it probes, absorbs, quizzes, rejects, and is ravished. It is not until he corresponds with the art historian and critic Georges Duthuit, in letters which form the basis of the Three Dialogues published in 1948 (and which provide the backbone to Volume II of the present edition), that anything approach ing a manifesto of the possible and significant in art of the present will be extracted from him. But these dialogues are dependent upon the prior exchanges with McGreevy, exchanges in which it is less the range of knowledge deployed which is remarkable than the immensity of the
83 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 April 1937. "Homme moyen sensuel" (average man with average tastes and appetites).
84 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 December 1937.
85 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 27 January 1938.
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Introduction to Volume I
curiosity displayed. Once again, Beckett is pursuing his own arduous curriculum, one which takes him away from the literary, but from which he is convinced the literary must learn.
Beckett's letters testify to an extraordinary visual memory, largely unassisted by the technical supports ofphotographs or reproductions. "I remember the Bassano in Hampton Court very well," he tells McGreevy; "In the second or third room, isn't it? The wild tormented colour. "86 His memory is such that he challenges established attribu tions - and several ofhis re-attributions have been vindicated by sub sequent catalogues. "I had forgotten the little Fabritius," he writes to McGreevy after a further visit to the Louvre, "A very slapdash attribu tion. More like a Flinck. "87 He refuses to believe that a small portrait ofa head in Ireland's National Gallery is a Velazquez (though he is much less certain about how to spell this painter's name). He advises his friend Arland Ussher, on the basis of a poor photograph, as to the possible attribution of a painting which Ussher has purchased: "As a decorative statement ofweights & tensions," he writes, "it seems to me to lack only technique & bravura to pair up with the easel recreations of Gianbattista [for Giambattista] Tiepolo & Sons. "88 He compiles for McGreevy exhaustive lists of the works he views during his tour of Germany, and even as he claims that "there is really not much point writing like this about the pictures," he "can't stop without mentioning the Poussin Venus. Beyond praise & appraisement. "89 He reports to McGreevy on the career ofGeorge Furlong, who is appointed Director oflreland's National Gallery in 1935, with a highly critical gaze, mock ing his lapses of taste in acquisitions, and ending by condemning his entire aesthetic policy: "It is time someone put him in mind of the purpose of a picture gallery, to provide pictures worth looking at and the possibility ofseeing them. "90 And he does this, characteristically, while all the time claiming that: 'Tm afraid I couldn't write about pictures at all. I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but now that need is gone. "91
86 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 March 1937.
87 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 April 1938.
88 SB to Arland Ussher, 14 June [1939].
89 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 16 February 1937.
90 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
91 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1936.
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Though the previously published and by now famous 1937 "German
Letter" to Axel Kaun uses Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to sketch a
possibility for literature, and though the letters do contain some fasci
nating insights into music - and into ballet and film as well - it is in
painting that Beckett most commonly intuits directions in which he
92
and in a request to McGreevy that he "forgive the degueulade. "93 What is glimpsed in Cezanne is more fully grasped in the work ofthe artist who will elicit from Beckett something as close as he comes at this stage to a fully fledged theory. Perhaps it is the very excitement at locating the artistic horizon so nearby, in the work ofan approachable compatriot, that leads him to find so many excuses not to accept Jack Yeats's repeated invitation to visit his studio during his "at-homes. " "Set out on Saturday afternoon to see Jack Yeats," he tells McGreevy, "and then en route changed my mind. "94 Yeats stirs in Beckett a rare acquis itive instinct, until the young unemployed writer is able to scrape together the cash to put down a deposit on a painting, Morning. As with Cezanne, it is the "ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness" that fascinates Beckett, and the sense in Yeats's painting of "the con vention & performance oflove & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken" having been "suddenly suspended. " Yeats leads Beckett to a "perception & dispassion" which, in contrast to what he finds in Watteau (to whom he likens Yeats), is "beyond tragedy. " Even as one resists the temptation to find countless adumbrations ofBeckett's later work in the letters, it is hard not to hear harbingers ofthe tone and vision that will become "Beckettian," when he writes: "the way he puts down a man's head & a woman's head side by side, or face to face, is
92 SB to Axel Kaun, 9 July 1937.
93 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934. "Degueulade" (throwing up). 94 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932].
xciii
In the work of Cezanne, first, Beckett sights - or sites - an all-important representation ofthe other ness ofthe world, "incommensurable with all human expressions what soever. " The "deanthropomorphizations of the artist" are the more precious in Cezanne's portraits, where the individual subject becomes "incapable ofloving or hating anyone but himselfor ofbeing loved or hated by anyone but himself'; a claim which Beckett immediately and doubly undermines, as ifhe had seen too much or reached too far, by signing off his letter in a firm rejection ofsolipsism - "God love thee" -
believes writing should be heading.
Introduction to Volume I
terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. "95 In Yeats's work, nature itself, Ireland's nature, becomes the setting of "the ultimate inorganism of everything. " And again the future looms, the theatrical work for which Beckett will be most cele brated, in the metaphor he uses to describe Ireland here: "a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. "96 When, in 1938, return ing to Ireland after a prolonged absence, he visits Yeats's studio and sees his "magnificent new picture," entitled Helen, he rediscovers the "same extraordinary tenderness & distinction of handling," and beyond that, "depth and a courage more than of conviction, of certainty, absolutely natural & unrhetorical. " He rediscovers the very sense of necessity that years previously he located in Homer and Dante, the sense of art as a physical extension of the self, an art which is as natural as breathing. Unable to produce his own art to match, Beckett the viewer none the less absorbs the impact: "I was really knocked all ofa heap. "97
If art hits, and must hit, the body, this is because it must emerge
from the body to begin with, if it is to be necessary. For the greats, this
may be as easy as breathing; for the remainder, which includes Beckett
himself, whose writing emerges "above an abscess and not out of a
cavity," the somatic impetus is less unambiguously life-sustaining or
98
95 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 ! August 1937].
96 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937.
97 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday 14 August 1938].
98 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
99 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1937 [for 1936].
100 SB to Thomas McGreevy.
