The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956

The Letters #2

by Samuel Beckett, George Craig (Editor), Martha Dow Fehsenfeld (Editor)

This second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett opens with the War years, when it was often impossible or too dangerous to correspond. The surge of letters beginning in 1945, and their variety, are matched by the outpouring and the range of Beckett's published work. Primarily written in French and later translated by the author, the work includes stories, a series of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable), essays and plays – most notably Waiting for Godot. The letters chronicle a passionately committed but little known writer evolving into a figure of international reputation, and his response to such fame. The volume provides detailed introductions which discuss Beckett's situation during the War and his crucial move into the French language, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Irish Literature, Biography

886 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2011

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 2d volume of a proposed 4-volume compilation of Beckett's letters. It covers the war years during which he played a role in the French Resistance, his settling in Paris and Ussy after the war, and his return to writing, though composing in French. During this postwar period he wrote the body of work for which he's most famous, the play Waiting for Godot and the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Almost all the letters are about his work rather than personal letters to friends. It's also true he wrote friends about his work. They, in turn, served to make his work public. Many are to stage producers, such as Roger Blin in Paris, famous for his work in and on Godot, or to publishers, agents, or translators. Reading, you notice they become like friends. So the distinction blurs. Beckett was a warm, generous man. You learn little about how he worked. He didn't say. He also refused to discuss meaning. The works mean what they say, he explained. It becomes more and more apparent that melancholy was a normal state for him. He writes many times of being sad or "not in the mood." Often he demonstrates the same hopeless resignation as his legendary characters, particularly in letters to Pamela Mitchell, an American lover. "In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again...." he wrote. He wrote Mitchell, "Yes, I'm gloomy, but I always am." To Patrick Waldberg he said "...not just the hope but the desire is dead...." These letters are the words of Beckett himself. He was a private man, though, and the reader won't learn much about him from them. Instead, the editors have provided a comprehensive and scholarly approach to his correspondence which includes thorough introductions describing Beckett's activities during those years, plus yearly chronologies and detailed notes accompanying each letter. Together with the letters this volume forms an important portrait of one of the most important writers of our time.

[Barry Wightman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. Peering into the head of the last Modernist. Beckett, writing of Waiting For Godot, says, " its simplicity, the waiting, the no knowing why or where or when or for what....so skeleton simple."

As Paul Auster says, reading Beckett "is an experience unequaled anywhere in the universe of words."

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the age of tweets and texts, letters are not just an obsolete form of communication but a long-winded one. Yet the depth and feeling of a great letter is irreplaceable, and Sam Beckett writes more than a few brilliant epistles in this volume.
Though these letters provide deep insight into the life of one of the 20th century's great writers, Beckett's correspondences with the French writer and critic, Georges Duthuit, from approximately 1947 to 1952, are brilliant philosophical queries into the matrix of life and art. Beckett engages in many other interesting exchanges with people like Barney Rosset of Grove Press, the great director Alan Schneider, Nancy Cunard and Jerome Lindon, his editor at Editions de Minuit.
Being a big fan of Beckett and letters in general, I thoroughly enjoyed this volume, which is, in my humble estimation, far more interesting than the first volume of Beckett's letters. They are, of course, not for everybody, but then what is?

[Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk Soup for the Nothing crowd.