No More Learning

Alan and Belinda Atkinson Duncan, Thomas McGreevy Courtesy of Margaret Farrington and Robert Ryan
9. GeoffreyThompson
Courtesy of the Thompson family
10. SamuelBeckett
Private collection of Nuala Costello
11. AbrahamJacobLeventhal(Con)
Courtesy ofThe Estate ofAnne Leventhal Woolfson Harding
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List ofillustrations
12. Percival Arland Ussher
Courtesy of Lady Staples and other representatives of The Estate ofArland Ussher
13. Ethna Maccarthy
Private collection; copyright Sean O'Sullivan
14. Mary Manning Howe
By permission of Susan Howe
15. Nuala Costello
Private collection of Nuala Costello
16. Ilse Lynn Schneider
By permission of Ilse von Keller
17. Geer and Lisl van Velde, Gwynedd and George Reavey Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION
My unique relation with my work - and it is a tenuous one - is
the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fum­
bling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no
light to throw on it myself and it seems a stranger in the light
1
Samuel Beckett was one of the great literary correspondents of the twentieth century, perhaps of any century. His letters, which stretch over a period of sixty years from 1929 to 1989, are not only numerous (more than 15,000 have been found and transcribed by the editors) but of an extraordinary range and intensity. They demonstrate his numer­ ous commitments: to reading in a systematic way the classics as well as the literatures of several cultures; to training himself in music and the visual arts; to learning languages, becoming fluent in at least five and familiar with many more; to keeping up with a broad range of acquain­ tances, friends, and professional associates; to answering in polite and timely fashion practically every letter that was addressed to him, even when he became famous and the inquiries grew in number; to writing, of course - criticism, fiction, poetry, drama; and perhaps more surpris­ ingly, a commitment to getting published and to seeing his dramatic work realized on stage. The letters also show the author's endeavor to lead the life that would make all these commitments realizable.
In view of how abruptly and rapidly letter writing has declined in recent decades - a decline that makes it hard to predict a great twenty­ first-century literary correspondence - it may be important to state that Beckett answered his own mail. There are a few exceptions to this general rule: in the late 1940s Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil represented his interests in early negotiations with Les Editions de Minuit; Beckett's French publisher Jerome Lindon drafted some letters concerning legal or business matters for his signature; for a short time
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that others throw.
General introduction
in the late 1960s A. J. Leventhal assisted him; and later, when ill health and eye problems made writing difficult, he jotted notes for the replies that he wished Les Editions de Minuit to write on his behalf.
While Beckett complained of the onerousness of writing, he answered his "mountains of mail" in a scrupulous manner. His letters were composed on various typewriters but more often in a longhand that became notorious for its difficulty, though when he took pity on the postman it could be quite readable. Ink blotches are relatively few, but pens and pencils differ widely in their legibility. One manuscript specialist proffered what was for the editors the less-than-encouraging opinion that Beckett had the worst handwriting of any twentieth­ century author. The letters themselves provide ironic commentary: "Don't suppose you can read this but can't face the machine. "2 Typed letters might promise to be a transcriber's boon, but in fact Beckett often wore a ribbon to shreds; in their amendments and cor­ rections, typewritten letters often show more changes of mind and expression than do handwritten ones. Beckett also availed himself of any letterhead or paper at hand: tearing a page from a notebook, using the back of an invitation, writing out poems on an envelope or a match book.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett is a selected rather than a complete edition of the letters owing principally to three factors: the terms of Beckett's authorization; the impossibility, so near in time to his death in 1989, of fixing the corpus definitively; and the practical difficulties of publishing in print form what would require more than a score of volumes to present in extenso. The four volumes of selected letters will present about 2,500 letters with another 5,000 quoted in the annotations. Until now, Beckett enthusiasts have had only one volume dedicated to Samuel Beckett's correspondence, and, as in the other publications that include letters, the letters here were addressed to a single recipient. 3 The Letters of Samuel Beckett will, therefore, be the first to integrate letters to the full range of recipients and to sample them over sixty years of Beckett's life and work.
Beckett's letters are addressed to intimates over decades of friendship, to occasional collaborators, to scholars, critics, students, and readers. The balance varies considerably. In Volumes 1 and II, up to the point where Beckett achieves public recognition - which corresponds roughly to the success of En attendant Godot (Warten auf Godot, Waiting for Godot) - the
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letters are predominantly to close friends and associates (including pub­ lishers), among whom are Thomas McGreevy, George Reavey, Mary Manning Howe, Charles Prentice, Morris Sinclair, Georges Duthuit, Mania Peron, Jerome Lindon, Barney Rasset, and Jacoba van Velde. In Volumes III and IV are letters from the last three decades ofBeckett's life, a time when his writing achieves worldwide attention, marked by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. The long exchanges of letters with friends continue, and by now these include his publishers Siegfried Unseld, John Calder, and Charles Monteith, as well as trans­ lators, directors, actors, producers, and other colleagues (Alan Schneider, Donald McWhinnie, Jack MacGowran, Barbara Bray, Ruby Cohn, Walter Asmus, Christian Ludvigsen, and Antoni Libera, among them). There are numerous letters to writers and aspiring writers.
By the end of his life, Beckett's work had been translated into more than fifty languages. His enduring concern with translation is evident in correspondence with his translators. Whether explaining a local reference or advising them to find an equivalent in their own literature, Beckett worked closely with those whose languages he knew and will­ ingly responded to the questions of translators whose languages were unfamiliar to him.
HISTORY OF THE EDITION
Those who, from their reading ofhis work or ofthe several biographies of him, have become used to thinking of Samuel Beckett as an excep­ tionally private man may be surprised at learning that in February 1985 Beckett authorized an edition of his letters, to be gathered during his lifetime and published following his death. Beckett's earlier antipathy toward publication ofhis letters, his general refusal to grant interviews, and his avowed "inability" to talk about his own writing, make it all the more welcome that he specifically wished to see published his letters bearing on the work.
The complexities of language, the dispersal of letters, and the com­ plications of ownership, as well as negotiations with publishers and The Estate ofSamuel Beckett have all contributed to delaying publication of the letters, as the history of the edition will make clear.
In February 1985 Beckett appointed his long-time friend and American publisher Barney Rasset (then President of Grove Press) as
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General Editor of the letters, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld as Editor, and he confirmed Lois More Overbeck as Associate Editor. Beckett had first become acquainted with Fehsenfeld in 1976 while she was preparing Beckett in the Theatre (1988, co-authored with Dougald McMillan). Following his request that she take charge of editing his correspond­ ence, he gave her his written authorization "to consult my letters and take copies, in view of eventual publication, of such passages as are relevant to her research. " He added, "This permission applies to all my letters, to whomsoever addressed and wheresoever preserved. "4 Beckett made it clear that he himself had no wish to direct the edition, writing for example to Carlton Lake at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,The University ofTexas at Austin, that queries regard­ ing the collecting and editing of his letters should not be addressed to him, since "I will not personally be responsible in any way for their selection and editing. "5
Notwithstanding his reluctance to direct the enterprise of gather­ ing and publishing his letters, Beckett did have many conversations with Fehsenfeld about the edition he envisaged. He enjoined the editors not merely to collect the letters but to establish their context.
Paris 18-3-85
Dear Martha,
Thanks for yrs of Feb 20.
I do have confidence in you & know that I can rely on you to
edit my correspondence in the sense agreed on with Barney, i. e. its reduction to those passages only having bearing on my work.
It would be a most difficult job and I am relieved at the thought of its being in such devoted and capable hands as yours.
I hope we may meet in Paris before too long & talk it over. Yours ever,
Sam6
Realizing the scale of the project, Beckett suggested to Martha Fehsenfeld that she enlist an assistant, whereupon she chose Lois More Overbeck, then Editor of The Beckett Circle and a scholar of modem
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drama whose studies of Beckett were based on manuscript research, and with whom she had previously worked on several extended proj­ ects. In 1989, in order to create a shorter document of authorization that could be shared with foundations, archives, and recipients of letters, a memorandum of agreement was signed by Samuel Beckett, Barney Rosset, and the editors. It stated: "The purpose of this project is to establish an authorized text of Mr. Beckett's correspondence, to be published internationally after the author's death, on terms and by publishers subject to Mr. Beckett's approval. "7 This agreement was countersigned by Beckett's nephew Edward Beckett after his uncle's death, with the addendum, "I fully support the edition of the corre­ spondence of Samuel Beckett under the terms and conditions as agreed and signed to above by the author. "8
Shortly after the contract was signed (along with that for Beckett's "production notebooks") in March 1985, Grove Press was sold to Weidenfeld and Getty; Barney Rosset was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Grove Press within the new company; it was a post he expected to hold for at least five years. However, in June 1986 Rosset was released from this position and began legal action against Weidenfeld and Getty for breach of contract. Although the editors continued their research, only when this matter was settled could they be confident that the newly constituted Grove Press "owned" the original contract and, therefore, that they could seek funding to permit the work on the edition to go forward. In 1993 Grove Press merged with Atlantic Monthly Press to become Grove/Atlantic Inc.
The corpus of the letters grew rapidly, far beyond initial expectations; by 1996 the editors realized that a four-volume edition was necessary. Grove/Atlantic affirmed that it would be willing to consider reassigning the rights for publication of a scholarly edition of the letters, upon approval of The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Cambridge University Press, long known for its publication of literary letters, expressed interest, and its Director of Humanities, Andrew Brown, entered into formal negotiations with The Estate of Samuel Beckett.
Negotiations between Cambridge University Press and The Estate of Samuel Beckett began in early 1999, chiefly through Beckett's Literary Executor, the owner and publisher of Les Editions de Minuit, Jerome Lindon. Deliberations proved complex, not least because of radically differing interpretations of what Samuel Beckett, now dead ten years,
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would have wished from an edition "only having bearing on my work. " The issue was whether this implied that the letters should be restricted to those in which there was specific mention of individual works or of his oeuvre (the Lindon view). The view ofthe editors was and remains that the letters themselves are important acts of writing, and signal Beckett's relation to other writers and artists. When Jerome Lindon died, in April 2001, no contract had been agreed on, although Cambridge University Press had made clear its intention to publish only Beckett's literary correspondence. The position of Literary Executor passed to Edward Beckett, with whose support, in September 2003, the original contract which named Barney Rosset as General Editor was released by Rosset and reassigned by Grove/Atlantic to Cambridge University Press. Protracted discussion was still necessary before a formal contract was eventually signed among the various parties in November 2005.
During the years of these complex negotiations the editors continued to work on the task of preparing the corpus, and as they did so they expanded the editorial team. Both Richard Ellmann, Editor of the Letters of James Joyce, and John Kelly, General Editor of The Collected Letters of W B. Yeats, urged the editors to seek the assistance of the distinguished editor Catharine Carver. She agreed to guide the editors in establishing the principles for the edition and offered creative editorial solutions to the many issues raised by the letters of Samuel Beckett. Knowing that her health would place limits on her participation, Catharine Carver introduced the editors to her friend Dan Gunn, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. In tum, he could think of no one better prepared to be French translator for the edition than George Craig, who had been his own mentor at the University of Sussex. As the French translator of the edition, Irish-born George Craig brings unusual qualifications to bear, having followed Beckett's own academic pathway, from Trinity College Dublin to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Later, responsibility for German trans­ lations for the edition was taken on by Viola Westbrook of Emory University, a native German speaker and a specialist in linguistic pedagogy, who also had a serendipitous tie to Samuel Beckett in that her mother Ilse Schneider had known Beckett when he was in Hamburg in 1936.
As the project developed, it became evident that it would be best served by affiliation with a research university. At the urging of Irish literary scholar and editor Ann Saddlemyer, together with the support of
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Ronald Schuchard and Alice Benston (both of Emory University), the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett found its academic home in the Graduate School of Emory University in 1990. Emory's generous support provided space and basic funding for research; its library and faculty (from Art History to Ophthalmology, from Physics to Classics) provided a rich intellectual base for what rapidly became a worldwide endeavor. The graduate fellows who worked with the editors at Emory and in libraries abroad contributed their scholarship, insight, and energy; Emory under­ graduates helped marshal the books, paper, and electronic files of the edition. Emory University contributed in-kind support for successive grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Florence Gould Foundation. The Gould Foundation award for research in French and American archives also made it possible for The American University of Paris (AUP) to serve as a Paris center for the edition. Students there collaborated in the French research as interns with the edition; they pursued queries in French libraries and, thanks to the international nature of the AUP student population, offered their further help in Germany, Greece, and England.
As the "Acknowledgments" indicate, the editors have received many grants for research in specific libraries and archives. What cannot be shown in a mere listing of names is how archivists and librarians from many institutions have become valued colleagues. Beckett scholars have been generous in sharing their work and papers with the edition. The small measure of acknowledgment afforded in print cannot begin to indicate the contribution in expertise and encouragement that the very large unofficial "team" has made to the edition.
Edward Beckett, as representative of The Estate of Samuel Beckett, has been a working partner in the preparation of this edition. He has joined editorial meetings and has been a ready negotiator at challeng­ ing junctures. Within the limitations placed on the edition by Samuel Beckett himself, he has responded generously where there was dis­ agreement over what counts as "having bearing on the work. "
LOCATING AND TRANSCRIBING THE LETTERS
When Samuel Beckett met the editors during the summer of 1986, he said simply, "You will get round and see these people, won't you. "
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These people were, of course, his correspondents. For Beckett, letters first of all represented a means of staying in touch; they were part of a living and often a life-long relationship. In order to discover and comprehend the common ground that letters both indicated and cultivated, the editors took Beckett's advice to "get round," and wherever possible met the persons with whom he had corresponded. Beckett's family, friends, and colleagues have been helpful and supportive, and in this they reflect the respect and affection they felt for the man they knew as "Sam. "
The editorial project is known as "The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett," even though its publication is entitled The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Both sides of the conversation between letter writers needed to be heard, although few recipients had kept either letters received or copies ofletters sent during the early years ofcorrespondence. In order to discern the context ofrelationships and issues in the correspond­ ence, the editors interviewed recipients, their families, and their col­ leagues; they consulted many archival collections well beyond those containing Beckett's letters, together with biographies, bibliographies, editions of letters, newspapers, and journals. Beckett's letters bear upon current events as well as on the broader reaches of history, literature, art, music, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, medicine, economics, philology, sport, and even meteorology. These all became indispensable fields of reference.
Samuel Beckett suggested persons whom the editors should approach, wrote cards of introduction, and made contacts on behalf ofthe editors. Even when he wrote directly to affirm his permission, these personal missives were occasionally challenged: "That never is Sam Beckett's handwriting," said one correspondent, "I can read every word. " Beckett's letters to Thomas McGreevy (which form the backbone of the first volume of the edition, as they do of the several biographies for the period of the 1930s) were in private hands in 1985, but Beckett agreed that the editors should consult them, saying: "I talk a lot about my work in them. " These letters produced a core for further research, as other collections did for the post-war period, particularly the letters to Georges Duthuit, Mania Peron, Jacoba van Velde, and Jerome Lindon. For Volumes III and N, letters to publishers, translators, directors, and old friends offered comparable starting points from which paths of research emerged.
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The editors first consulted Beckett collections in public archives such as the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, the Beckett International Foundation at Reading University in England, and the manuscript reading room above the Long Room of the Library of Trinity College Dublin. By reading widely in corollary collections as well, the editors established a growing list of persons known to have corresponded with Samuel Beckett. Next, the editors arranged to con­ sult corporate collections, including a publisher's archive kept in boxes under the stairs and an agent's collection brought from a riverside warehouse. The editors also pursued private collections, where it was not uncommon to find Beckett's letters mingled with a lifetime's accu· mulation of papers and books; to sort through these materials took care and time. Increasingly over the years since the project began in 1985, collections have shifted from private ownership to archives - some­ times as gifts, sometimes through a series of sales via auction houses and dealers. Often, transition has delayed access.
Whenever possible, the editors met Beckett's correspondents; if the individuals had died, the editors contacted family members and asso­ ciates, and examined archives that related to their lives and work. These conversations led to other individuals within a particular circle of friends or clarified the roles played by the staff members in a publishing house or illumined Beckett's work with a theatrical production team. This both widened an understanding of the context of the letters and provided awareness of relationships between people and of differences between cultures: Dublin was as unlike Paris in the 1930s as Berlin in 1936 was unlike Berlin in 1975.
"Reading" the letters was a process involving several steps. Whenever possible, the editors first consulted the letters on location, whether in an archive or at someone's dining-room table. Letters were transcribed, both on site and (with the help of photocopies) in the project's office; they were compared as necessary with letters and documents from further collections. Additional research was done to complete partial titles or confirm a date or verify a name. The final step was to verify transcriptions against the originals.
Because each recipient's letters from Beckett embody an evolving and sometimes decades-long relationship, the editors transcribed collections from beginning to end, consulting corollary correspondences and inves· tigating related publications. This was hardly a neatly compartmentalized
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process since archlves and people were seldom in a single locale, and research was done for several collections when these were held in a common archlve. In the case of business archlves, the editors were greatly helped by those familiar with the procedures of a publisher or theatrical agent or the artistic processes ofa production group. Judith Schmidt Douw assisted with the Grove Press archlves at the University of Syracuse; Leah Schmidt helped with the London archlve of Curtis Brown (the agents representing Beckett's theatrical work in English), providing context for the history of the firm's work on behalf of Beckett's texts. Stefani Hunzinger and Connie Ricono, theatrical agents representing Beckett's work in Germany and Italy respectively, offered insight into theatre management in their countries; Reinhard Miiller­ Freienfels, cameraman Jim Lewis, and soundstage engineer Konrad Korte, who had collaborated with Beckett on the realization of ms tele­ vision plays at Siiddeutscher Rundfunk, helped the editors understand that process.
When a critical mass of individual collections had been prepared, all the letters were organized into a single chronological file. The merged files filled in details and offered new associations. More importantly, this overview ofthe whole collection, together with the chronicle ofthe individual collections ofletters, made it possible to adjudicate propor­ tion and balance in the subsequent process ofselecting letters for publication. While it had been assumed that the letters themselves would suggest narrative lines, what also emerged was a sense ofthe widely varying voices ofthe writer. Letters written on the same day to different persons might present similar information, but to very differ­ ent effect. Sometimes the passage of time altered points of view, as when a new idea or a particular production problem led Beckett to reconsider how a play might be enacted.
Viewing the letters from beginning to end made clear the scale ofthe editorial task. This supposedly "withdrawn" and "taciturn" writer was engaged in voluminous correspondences: two hundred letters to one individual, three hundred to another, over six hundred to another.
PRINCIPLES OF SELECTION
The four volumes of The Letters of Samuel Beckett will publish approxi­ mately 2,500 letters in full, with as many as 5,000 others cited in the
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General introduction
annotations. As mentioned above, Beckett himself supplied the first principle of selection, when he gave permission to publish "those passages only having bearing on my work. "
Selection is, inevitably, an act ofinterpretation. The explicit goal has been to strike a balance between the unique and the representative, while making available as many letters as possible that are pertinent to Beckett's writing. The editors' first step was to establish the corpus in order to draw from the largest possible sense of the whole. As letters continued to appear or to be discovered, these inevitably tested and altered the editors' frame and perspective. Certain letters presented themselves as obvious candidates for inclusion, no matter what the size or scope of the individual collection; others fluctuated in the con­ text of surrounding letters. It was important that the scope and diver­ sity of the letters be registered: simple acknowledgments, precise instructions to a publisher, rights negotiations, experiments with regard to production issues, hesitant venturings, extended aesthetic discussions, and thoughtful gestures of friendship. The selected edition needed to give space to letters that were remarkable in tone or content, and it needed to have breadth and nuance. The editors were concerned that their own interests should not dictate this scope; indeed, the diversity oftheir specialties helped ensure that the dialogue ofselection was a lively and balanced one.
Principles of inclusion were formed and tested, then re-formed, re-tested, and re-applied. Among the central questions were: Does the letter record a signal event in Beckett's working life? Does the letter reveal Beckett as a writer? Does it represent the working relation­ ships that he had with colleagues? Does it offer glimpses of Beckett's reading, thinking, and valuing? Does it show his responses to art and music? Subtending all these questions: Does the letter illuminate the oeuvre?
Everywhere there were choices to be made. A great many postcards were written when Beckett was away on holiday, and many letters confirm receipt of books or newspaper cuttings. Most of Beckett's correspondents in the later years received a small correspondence card written to arrange, say, an eleven o'clock coffee at the Petit Cafe Frarn;:ais de l'H6tel PLM on the Boulevard St. Jacques; some correspond­ ents received many such cards. A choice among similar letters and cards was determined, in part, by the contribution each could make to the
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overall narrative. Did the particular card or letter establish or show a continuing working relationship? Did it fill a gap in time or explain a change of location? Did it lead to further communication that became important to Beckett's work?
The line between the life and the work is not easy to distinguish. What may appear entirely personal in a particular letter may tum up, months or years later, practically unchanged, in a published work. What may appear as markedly literary has often emerged from an intimate, lived sense of connection or dislocation.
The editors wished to present letters in their entirety, annotated with portions of other letters Beckett wrote. They had to accept, however, that any edition that deals with living contemporaries and their imme­ diate families must respect personal privacy and public reputation. The editors' views have not always coincided with those of The Estate of
Samuel Beckett, particularly when the Literary Executor was Jerome Lindon who understood Beckett's "work" to mean only the published oeuvre. When Edward Beckett became Literary Executor, he largely agreed with the editors' insistence that letters themselves are impor­ tant acts of writing, that "work" included jettisoned as well as pub­ lished writing, and that Beckett's reading, and his interests in art and music, as well as his relation to other writers, musicians, and artists, were all significant to the literary work.
The editors believe, especially because the several biographies of Beckett make liberal use of the letters in quotation or paraphrase, that there remains very little reason to exclude a letter, or part of a letter, because of what Beckett says about himself. To take one exam­ ple, it is the editors' view that Beckett's frequent, at times almost obsessive, discussion of his health problems - his feet, his heart palpi­ tations, his boils and cysts - is of direct relevance to the work; with this The Estate of Samuel Beckett has disagreed.
Rather than exclude a letter because it speaks of an individual's difficulties, or includes repetition of mere gossip (here considered the relayingofthecommentsofathirdparty),ortouchesonmattersjudged too intimate, the editors have followed a policy of inclusion, publishing letters relevant to Beckett the writer. Although doing so has required some ellipses, the editors have tried to limit these. Every letter included in the edition is cited with its current ownership, and those in archives can be consulted in full.
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LANGUAGES
Beckett wrote letters primarily in English (65 percent), and also in French (30 percent), and German (5 percent). The choice of language may have been determined by the first language of his recipient or by a language they had in common, or sometimes by other factors, such as when he writes to McGreevy in French to safeguard the privacy of their exchanges, or when he wishes to play. The richness of his language and syntax, as well as Irish turns of phrase, occasional Gallicisms, and multilingual puns, his knowledge of several languages and his willing­ ness to mix them, his etymological curiosity and his immense vocabu­ lary - all these as well as many other features present challenges not faced by editors working on a writer more solidly anchored in a single tradition or time.
PRESENTATION
Beckett's letters themselves have guided the formation of the editorial principles. The editors' goal has been to let the letters speak for them­ selves wherever possible, their preference being for a minimum of intrusion. The letters are presented as written, preserving Beckett's habits and idiosyncrasies. Letters are presented as clear copy, reflecting the changes that Beckett made as or after he wrote them, that is to say, the letter as it was received by its recipient. If Beckett canceled a word and inserted a phrase, his insertion is included; if Beckett corrected his spelling, the corrected word is shown. Other than obvious typograph­ ical errors such as overtypes and extra spaces, there are no silent emendations. Editorial emendations made to clarify ambiguity are pre­ sented within square brackets (preceded by a question mark if a reading is doubtful) to signal that these are not Beckett's words. Letters are presented in their original language; translation into English follows; words or phrases from languages other than the dominant one of the letter are translated in the notes.
Each letter is prefaced by the name of the recipient and the place to which the letter was written (if known), since Beckett seldom includes the recipient's name and address in the body of his letters. The date and the place of writing are given as written. Beckett's signature is recorded
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as written. Postscripts are placed following the signature; their place­ ment in the original is noted, if it differs from what appears.
A bibliographical note follows each letter, presenting a description of the document, indicating whether autograph or typed, whether signed or initialed, whether postcard or lettercard; this includes the number of leaves and sides of the letter. It also records any notations on the letter in another hand or damage to the document that affects legibility. This note indicates if the letter is written on letterhead or if a card bears the imprint ofBeckett's name; it records the image in the case ofa picture postcard. Also included are the details ofsending and the enve­ lope, if one exists: the addressee and address, the postmark, and any other notations, even in another hand, such as forwarding instructions. Finally, the note records the ownership or repository of the letter.
This information is followed, where required, by a discussion of dating. Beckett occasionally misdates letters, especially at the begin­ ning ofa new year. In a correspondence that follows a personal meeting or in which letters are exchanged with rapidity, as for example in that with Georges Duthuit, only the time of day or the day of the week may be given.
Any dating supplied editorially is given within square brack­ ets, with doubtful dating noted; occasionally the dating supplied can only suggest a date range.
ANNOTATION
During early conversations concerning the edition, Beckett told the editors, "Please, no commentary. " The editors rejoined: "Not commen­ tary, but there must be context. " And to this he readily agreed.
The inevitable questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why? ) led the editors into sometimes arcane areas of research, such as menus and timetables, playbills and weather reports, exchange rates and sports results. A recipient's letters to Beckett were of course the most helpful resource, when they were available. When they were not, the recipients and their associates were usually informative and ready to suggest further avenues of research. Often, other Beckett letters provided nec­ essary information; whenever possible, these are used in the notes. When need arose to clarify an issue not addressed by published sources, specialists and scholars in many fields were consulted. In shaping the annotations, the editors wanted to open future research, not limit it,
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keeping in mind that future generations of readers and scholars would ask new questions of these letters.
There are several views which may be taken of notes in an edition of letters, ranging from what could be called the "maximalist" approach, employed for example in The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats under the General Editorship of John Kelly, to the "minimalist" approach favored by Richard Ellmann in his edition of the Letters of
James Joyce. Both approaches have their virtues. The former helps the inquiring reader to understand the context and the often obscure refer­ ences, but risks distracting attention from the letters themselves. The latter keeps the focus on the principal object, but risks leaving the reader with many unanswered questions. This is a selected rather than a complete edition of the letters, annotated whenever possible by other letters written by Beckett. The editors have tended toward the "minimalist" approach to annotation, although, because of the very complex nature of the material, at times it may not seem so. The governing principle is that what is indispensable to the understanding of the letter be noted; however, with a writer as learned, as multi­ lingual, and as well versed in the history of literature, art, and music as Beckett was, the quantity of what may be indispensable is often dauntingly extensive.
Any annotation makes assumptions about the level of general and specialized knowledge that readers might be expected to have, as well as about the research tools to which readers might reasonably be expected to have ready access. While the readers who may be familiar with the 1930s or even the 1950s have been decreasing in number, the quantity of readers has been growing who have almost instant access, through internet search engines, to a fund of sources, such as digital­ ized out-of-print texts, electronic catalogues of museum collections, and searchable text bases. The present edition seeks to be a scholarly edition of record, and it presumes levels of cultivation that this implies, while presuming this unevenly: given that readers of Beckett are more likely to be well versed in literature than in the visual arts, more is taken for granted in literary arenas than in the domains of art or music, or indeed those of chess or mathematics or television production, or the myriad other fields in which Beckett invested himself.
Annotations immediately follow the letter, its bibliographical note, and its translation; because the notes apply to both the letter and its
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translation, endnotes have been preferred to footnotes. The notes seek to identify the persons, places, events, and other references in letters. Often they point to sources for further detail, such as Beckett's own notebooks, various editions of his works, and his reading, but allusions to parallel passages or echoes in Beckett's works are not supplied because these would be too numerous. When possible, annotations draw upon other documents and letters to, from, and about Beckett. Sources of quotations are cited within the note, including location information for unpublished materials. At the end of each volume there is a bibliography of published works cited.
The initial identification of a person generally includes the full name, followed by any nickname or pseudonym, dates of birth and death, and a brief note on his or her career or activity at the time of first reference; any dubious information is preceded by a question mark. Subsequent refer­ ence will not repeat this information, but may expand on it as an indi­ vidual changes name, role, or occupation; readers who do not read sequentially should use the index for the location of this information. Short biographies of recipients and other persons as well as brief accounts of publications and institutions referred to with some frequency in the letters can be found in the appendix, "Profiles. " Fuller detail concern­ ing editorial practice, including abbreviations, notations, idiosyncrasies of Beckett's usage, as well as a discussion of the editorial principles of translation, are presented later in the introductory matter. A chronol­ ogy for each year provides an overview and precedes the letters for each year.
THE FOUR VOLUMES
The original contract for the edition called for three volumes of letters, but the quantity of the sixty years of correspondence quickly made four volumes more practical. The divisions between the volumes presented themselves rather naturally.
Volume I (1929-1940) begins with a letter written from Germany to James Joyce in Paris; it ends with a letter to Marthe Arnaud, the com­ panion of Bram van Velde, written as the Nazis were about to occupy Paris. In the eleven years represented in Volume I, Beckett explores a world beyond Ireland: he is on the move, from his post at the Ecole Normale Superieure to his lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, from
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his alternating periods ofresidence in London and Dublin between 1933 and 1937 to his travels through Germany in late 1936 and early 1937. Although Beckett has settled in Paris by the end of1937, Ireland is never entirely left behind.
In the early years, Beckett is imagining a literary life even while he proclaims his disqualification from it. Thomas McGreevy is the princi­ pal sounding-board during this period, while others provide a more or less perceptive and responsive audience: George Reavey, Arland Ussher, Edward Titus, Samuel Putnam, Eugene and Maria Jolas, James Joyce, Jack B. Yeats, Charles Prentice, Nuala Costello, Mary Manning Howe, Brian Coffey, to name but the most significant figures. The writing of letters constitutes for Beckett both a warming-up exercise and an end in itself, an act ofwriting often as exciting as anything he is composing with a view to publication. Although some of his writing from this period remains unpublished, Beckett's Proust, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates, More Pricks than Kicks, and the novel Murphy appear in print, as do poems, essays, and stories in Dublin, London, and Paris journals.
During the War years, Beckett served in the French Resistance and avoided capture by the Gestapo by escaping to Roussillon in Unoccupied France. While there were communications during this period, they were official telegrams transmissible only to and through the Irish Legation in Vichy - the barest lines telegraphed on behalf ofBeckett to his family about health or money, with no mention of his work.
Volume II (1945-1956) opens in the aftermath ofWorld War II, when Beckett is visiting Ireland before his return to France in 1945 as a member ofan Irish Red Cross field hospital team. In the twelve years represented in this volume Beckett produces the work for which he is best known - a period, then, of unprecedentedly intense literary activ­ ity, but also a period ofsometimes frenetic letter-writing. By the end of this time, En attendant Godot has been translated and performed in France and Germany (1953), England and Ireland (1955), as well as the United States (1956), and Beckett's reputation is secure. During this period, Beckett begins to write seriously in French, most notably the three novels, Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable, and the plays Eleutheria and En attendant Godot. This period also sees Beckett form his most explicit and fully articulate aesthetic, which grows in no small
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General introduction
measure out of his long and impassioned correspondence with Georges Duthuit, art historian and Editor of the post-war version of the journal Transition. During this period, and not without difficulty, Beckett forges permanent ties with publishers and agents who will represent his work for the rest of his creative life: Les Editions de Minuit in France, Grove Press in New York, John Calder and Faber and Faber in London, Fischer Verlag and Suhrkamp in Germany.
Although Beckett resigned himself to being "written out" by 1957, the letters of Volume III record a period marked by experiment. During this time, Beckett writes for radio and film, creates new possibilities for drama in Fin de partie, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, and generates new and formidably challenging narrative forms with Comment c'est and other, shorter fictions. He also becomes personally engaged in the practical realization of his work on the stage and in radio, film, and television. Beckett decided, certainly by the time of the English trans­ lation of En attendant Godot, that he must himself take responsibility for translating his texts, whether conceived and written in French or English, into the other language, and, with very few exceptions, he did. Still, for him, moving a work from one language to another was next to impossible.
Letters from this period are often directed to specific issues: ques­ tions posed by translators, the problems of directors, or the sequencing of a series of short prose pieces for inclusion in a collection. Supporting materials for this volume include interviews with Beckett's friends, edi­ tors, directors, designers, performers, and "crrritics. " The editors con­ sulted scripts, photos, recordings, reviews, and letters to and from Beckett's production teams. While the research for this volume has been marked by a greater possibility of direct conversation with the recipients of Beckett's letters, it has also entailed working with papers that are primarily in private hands, or which are in the process of being transferred to archives.
At the end of 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize, an honor which his wife Suzanne described as a "catastrophe. " The unsought bounty of worldwide attention that follows is reflected in Volume IV, which stretches from 1970 to the author's death in 1989. The encum­ brance of mail intensifies: there are replies to old friends, responses to new correspondents, meetings to arrange, and projects to authorize, guide, or deflect. Still, Beckett finds ways to retain the privacy necessary
xxviii
for his writing, for this is a period that sees the publication and produc­ tion of many new works. The possibilities of television are more fully explored in Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds. . . , Nacht und Triiume, and Quad. In his stage plays, Beckett expands the presence of interiority often through recorded sound, in such works as That Time, Footfalls, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and Quoi ou. As he has done from the start of his writing career, Beckett continues to write poetry during his final years, and the resulting works range from the brief and pithy Mirlitonnades to the open-ended musing of "Comment dire. " This is the period of Le Depeupleur, Still, Company, Mal vu mal dit, Worstward Ho, and Stirrings Still.
LACUNAE
There were times when Beckett and his correspondents were moving frequently between countries with little more than what a suitcase could hold; unnecessary papers were jettisoned as a result. Along with documents that have been lost, places have changed: certain buildings no longer exist where they once stood, streets have been renamed. Works of art are moveable properties: it is not surprising that some of the paintings which Beckett saw in one museum should be in a differ­ ent collection now. Normal changes over time were multiplied by the havoc ofWorld War IL Some works ofart that Beckett viewed in private collections and museums during his German travels in 1936-1937 were confiscated, sold, or destroyed. The editors' research has necessitated identifying the location and ownership ofsuch art works, both past and present.
All contemporary readers are removed in time and culture from the immediate contexts of Beckett's letters. The editors readily acknowl­ edge that there are gaps in their knowledge, and have not hesitated to report the limits of what they have been able to discover, indicating when handwriting is illegible, when a reference is unclear, when evi­ dence is insufficient, or when the relevant information has simply not been found. Whether in a reference to a once-common patent medicine or to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the letters testify to how rapidly the quotidian reality has changed.
The fact that most of Samuel Beckett's letters open with some form of "Glad to have your letter" shows that letters were, for him, a welcome
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General introduction
and real connection. In writing replies, Beckett acknowledges and often attempts to bridge the gaps of time, distance, and circumstance. Even though the instability of all the terms (the writer, his fictive voice, the occasion, and the reader) conspire against it, a letter purports to miti­ gate, ifnot to close, the gap between writer and reader. 9
NOTES
1 Samuel Beckett to Arland Ussher, 6 November 1962, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin (hereafter "TxU"). Hereafter "SB" will be used in the notes to refer to Samuel Beckett.
2 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 25 December 1965, TxU.
3 Samuel Beckett, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan
Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Some of these letters were published in Samuel Beckett, "Beckett's Letters on 'Endgame': Extracts from His Correspondence with Director Alan Schneider," The Village Voice 19 March 1958: 8, 15; rpt. in The Village Voice Reader: A Mixed Bagfrom the Greenwich Village Newspaper, ed. Daniel Woolf and Edwin Fancher (New York: Doubleday, 1962) 182-186; 2nd edn. (New York: Grove Press, 1963) 166-169; rpt. as "On Endgame" in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984) 106-110, and in translation.
The following publish full letters to individuals: Samuel Beckett and Erich Franzen, "Correspondence on Translating MOLLOY," Babel 3 (Spring 1984) 21-35; Claire Stoullig and Nathalie Schoeller, eds. , Bram van Ve! de [to Marthe Arnaud, Bram van Velde, Jacques Putman, some facsimile! (Paris: Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989) 160, 165, 172-175, 183, 185, 187-189; Maurice Nadeau, Graces ! eur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel. 1990) 363-369; Vivienne Abbot, "How It Was: Egan and Beckett" in Desmond Egan: The Poet and His Work, ed. Hugh Kenner (Orono, ME: Northern Lights, 1990) 45-53; Samuel Beckett, "Letters to Barney Rosset. " The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10. 3 (Fall 1990) 64-71; Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset, "The Godot Letters: A Lasting Effect" (Letters of Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset), The New Theatre Review 12 (Spring 1995) 10-13; Marin Kannitz, Comedie [facsimile! (Paris: Les Editions du Regard, 2001) 14-25; and Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett [to Avigdor Arikha and Anne Atik, facsimile! (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
Exhibition, library. and dealer catalogues in print and on the Web have repro­ duced Beckett's letters. Those that reproduce the widest range of letters are: Carlton Lake, with the assistance of Linda Eichhorn and Sally Leach, No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue ofBooks, Manuscripts, and Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities Research Center (Austin: Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1984); Marianne Alphant and Nathalie Leger, eds. , Objet: Beckett (Paris: Centre Pompidou, IMEC-Editeur, 2007).
Numerous publications have included individual letters. The letter to Axel Kaun and the letter to Sergei Eisenstein included in this volume have been the most frequently published. Previous publications of individual letters are indicated in the bibliographical notes for them in this and subsequent volumes.
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General introduction
4 SB to Martha Dow Fehsenfeld [summer 1986], private collection.
5 SB to Carlton Lake, 24 October 1987,JohnJ. Bums Library of Rare Books and Special
Collections. Boston College, Rasset Collection (hereafter "Bums Library").
6 SB to Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, 18 March 1985, private collection.
7 Signed by SB, 28 March 1989.
8 Signed by Edward Beckett, 24 April 1990.
9 "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit" in Beckett, Disjecta, 144.
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FRENCH TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
Translation is never simple, but it is normally, in at least one major respect, straightf01ward: the translator renders from the native lan­ guage of the writer into the native language of the reader. With Beckett we have a different reality. In the first place, his native language is English; French is a language which he gradually acquires, in a learning process that runs from total ignorance in early childhood to near-total ease and competence in later years. When Beckett permanently settles in France from late 1937 and begins to make friends with, among others, monoglot French-speakers, some at least ofthe letters have to be written in French, whatever his level of competence. It is, of course, not a simple switch. In most cases, he does it for the obvious practical reasons: the addressee knows only French, or has only limited English. But Beckett sometimes chooses to write in French to friends or acquaintances whose native language is English - now playfully, now ostentatiously, now as part ofa particular intimacy. Many ofthe English letters contain some French, from single words or short phrases to whole paragraphs.
The translator, then, must keep in mind two dimensions ofBeckett's French: the historical-developmental and the tonal. In the first, the earliest step will be deciding where Beckett is, at the moment ofwrit­ ing, in what we have come to call the learning curve. Inevitably this will matter above all in the early letters, when he is only a little way on from his formal study of French, and less and less as time goes on, although it never disappears. In later volumes we shall see Beckett writing drafts of French-language letters, especially ifthe letter involves the essentially unfamiliar territory oflegal or administrative language (as for instance in inquiries about rights, or negotiations with theatre managers and impresarios, as distinct from directors and actors, with whom commu­ nication is both easier and more natural). There is one extraordinary letter that illustrates the effects ofsuch hesitation: Beckett's request to Sergei Eisenstein (dated 2 March 1936) to be allowed to work in Moscow
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French translator's preface
under his guidance. The document that survives has a standard French beginning (the formal "Monsieur") and a comparably formal French ending ("Veuilliez agreer mes meilleurs hommages") although the first word is incorrectly spelled. The tone of the whole mixes English and French styles. The initial choice of French is of course sensible: it is highly probable that Eisenstein will be more at ease with French. The body of the letter, however, is in English, but here too there are unmis­ takable signs of haste: three not-quite-sentences, dotted with abbrevi­ ations, sketching in his CV, as well as other oddities. In short, it reads like a draft. It seems wholly unlikely that anybody with Beckett's respect for Eisenstein could have sent such a mishmash while asking, or at least hoping, for a favorable response from the great man. Beckett's letters to friends give evidence of the ease with which he moves between English and French, but this letter exemplifies hesitations that go beyond lan­ guage. It is impossible to say what changes of thought or mood triggered the decision to send it, but send it he did.
The developmental dimension takes on greater importance once Beckett has decided to write some of his works for publication in French, a decision which means, among other things, that writing in French can never again be exclusively private. The letters allow us insight into the consequences of Beckett's decision, but remind us too that Beckett is still also an English-speaker, still also someone who writes for publication in English. This brings up a question of enduring importance. Responsible translators worry at times about whether they have or have not "got it right"; whether their man or woman "would have said that. " They worry, in fact, that they may have betrayed the writer whose work they have rendered. Always, as if in mockery of their attempts, they can hear the dire finality of "traduttore traditore"; but they learn to live with that risk. With Beckett, the situation is more challenging. Of virtually any letter it could be said that he might have written part or all of it in English. But the body of English-language letters is there to remind the boldest as well as the most timorous of translators that English-Beckett, or indeed Beckett-English, cannot simply be presumed - or, without great risk, invented. What is to be done with his idiosyncratic wordplay? Will the translator's nonce-words give the flavor of Beckett's? And what of his disregard for French practice in capitalization (names of days or months, titles of books, names of institutions), or again, his erratic
xxxiv
use of diacriticals (his address for some months, the "Hotel Liberia," often appears without diacriticals; the cedilla needed on "�a" or "<;:a" hardly ever appears, partly due to the limitations of his typewriter)? And so on.
Clearly, these questions cannot be left in the air. The decisions taken for this edition are as follows. The governing assumption is that we will at all points draw on the English-language letters of the time as indica­ tive of what is idiomatically appropriate, particularly in the case of colloquialisms. This has often meant excluding what might well be neater or more forceful expressions if these were not in circulation at the time of writing. Thus World War II slang moved beyond "fed up" to "browned off' and on through variants like "cheesed (off)" to the near-universal "pissed (off)": all or any of these would have fitted the mood of Beckett faced with publishers' neglect or rejections, but none of them was available in the 1930s, when almost all of the letters in the first volume were written. Nor is this only a matter ofchoice ofwords. It was customary in the 1930s to write "I did not," "they were not," "it is," and so on; by the end of the 1940s the contractions "I didn't," "they weren't," "it's," etc. , are much more frequently found. Not the least interesting feature of such changes is the wide variation in speed of acceptance: trend-conscious journalists in the fast lane, so to speak, elderly scholars stalling in the slow lane. Beckett's own practice is variable. It is worth noting, for example, that in the late 1930s, Beckett was still writing "to-day" and "to-morrow. " In the case of his inventions (nonce-words, portmanteau-words, and the like), the aim is that of representing not just the semantic or tonal direction, but also the charge (the greater or lesser boldness). As for Beckett's "mistakes" (slips of the pen, misspelled or misremembered proper names, the occasional incoherence inevitable in unrevised writings), policy is not to repeat these in editorial matter, but rather to use the form regarded as correct now ("today," "Hotel Liberia") and, in the case of capital­ ization in titles, to use current French practice for French words and English for English.
Dwarfing all these is a still more troubling, even frightening, worry. It is the obverse side of Beckett's decision to write for publication in French. What would he have said in the other language? A single example will make the point. If, when writing to a friend, he were to say of a man they both know: "II y a longtemps que je ne l'ai pas vu,"
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French translator's preface
there are obvious translations: "I have not seen him for a long time," or "It is a long time since I saw him. " But Beckett is an Irishman, and, if writing to a fellow Irishman, he might well have said (and often did say) "I have not seen him this long time," a phrase requiring an audible stress on "long," a usage not found in standard English. If the translator is aware of both possibilities, which one should he choose? In practice, our decision is to allow lrishisms only where it is clear that the addres­ see is familiar with them. This hypothetical example is relatively trivial, but it points up something that goes far beyond the usual preoccupa­ tions of translators: Beckett's relation to his native language -which is, let us be quite clear, English, not Irish, a language which he does not know. That relation is not something that can be dealt with in these few pages, but certain aspects of it are immediately relevant. For the rela­ tion is not symmetrical, in a pattern where, as it might be, the French gets better while the English gets worse. Then again, Beckett's case is quite unlike that of, say, Kafka, aware of a linguistic limbo in which, for external historico-political reasons, three languages press on him: German, Czech, and Yiddish. Nor is Beckett like Nabokov, whose even­ tual decision to go over to writing in English is linked to his rejection of Soviet Russia.
Beckett's case is in fact a familiar one -but not among writers. It is the case of all those who, for whatever reason, have freely chosen to immerse themselves in the life, language, and culture of another coun­ try. Not unlike the evolution of a love affair, the first phase is often marked by idealization of the new object, and a tendency to run down what went before. This is very much in evidence in the second and third volumes of the Letters, written in a period when he is working on trans­ lations of his own work into English. This task is for him both burden­ some and irritating, in part at least because of his ambivalent relation with his native language (at one moment, "cette horrible langue"). He never loses his distaste for the chore of translation, but his acute con­ cern with the translation of his own work indicates that the issues go well beyond likes and dislikes.
Once the fame of Godot has spread, translations follow, almost all into languages of which Beckett knows little or nothing, but there is at least one interesting intermediate case: German. His reading and his visits to Germany have given him some familiarity with the language: nothing comparable to his grasp of French, or indeed of Italian, but capable of
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prompting in him worries about aspects of his translator's work. As it happens, his primary German translator, Elmar Tophoven, is capable of responding appropriately, and there ensues a fascinating correspond­ ence and an enduring friendship. More generally, Beckett's letters to his translators, as well as illustrating his moral generosity and his appreci­ ation oftheir efforts, abound in acute and revealing reflections on writing and language.
There is one further area in which international difference matters: the representation ofwords, and above all proper names, from languages (Russian, Greek, Arabic mainly) that do not use the Roman alphabet. The case ofRussian illustrates the difficulty perfectly. Transliteration is an attempt to represent as closely as possible the sounds ofRussian, but the representations themselves vary according to the norms of the receiving language. Thus the Russian poet is Pushkin for English-speakers, but Pouchkine for the French, while the dramatist is respectively Chekhov and Tchekhov.