When this second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters opens, he is on the run from the Nazis, who have just taken Paris. When it ends, in 1956, the Irish writer will have produced nearly all his major work: the trilogy of novels consisting of “Molloy,”“Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”; the dense “Texts for Nothing”; and, not least, two of the greatest plays in world literature: “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame.”
There are no surviving letters from the war years, during which Beckett participated in the Resistance’s legendary “Gloria” network. But in 1945, he is again back in Paris writing stories and short novels that no one wants: “They go out into the usual void and I hear little more about them.”
(Cambridge University Press) - "The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956" edited by George Craig et al.
To supplement a small family allowance, he translates (mainly for the literary magazine Transition and, later, for a UNESCO anthology of Mexican poetry) while his lifelong companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil earns a little as a dressmaker. They both spend a lot of time looking at art — Beckett is enthusiastic about the paintings of Jack B. Yeats (younger brother of the poet W.B. Yeats) and Bram van Velde — and he discusses aesthetics frequently with the critic Georges Duthuit. Yet as he enters his 40s, he is still drifting:
“I see advertised in to-day’s Irish Times an editorial vacancy on the staff of the RGDATA (Retail Grocery Dairy and Allied Trades Association) Review at 300 pounds per an. I think seriously of applying. Any experience of trade journalism would be so useful.”
Fortunately for world literature, he doesn’t send in his résumé. Instead, he announces a momentous decision: “I do not think I shall write very much in English in the future.” With this commitment to French, Samuel Beckett embarks on 10 years of astonishing creativity.
He takes just six months in 1947 to produce “Molloy,” rests for a month then starts “Malone Dies,” which takes about the same amount of time. A footnote informs us that “Waiting for Godot” was written between October 1948 and January 1949. In the evenings, he devours mysteries or goes back to favorite books like “that most moving and beautiful novel Theodor Fontane’s ‘Effi Briest’. . . . I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.” When not writing or complaining about his health and the onset of old age, Beckett happily plants trees and digs in the garden of a small house he’s found 30 miles outside of Paris:
“Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude . . . I feel this evening that that would suit me, and suit me the least badly possible. I have bought a wheelbarrow, my first wheelbarrow! It goes very well, with its one wheel. I keep an eye on the love-life of the Colorado beetle and work against it, successfully but humanely, that is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!”
That last sentence is characteristic of the gloomy Beckett we all love.
Beckett’s fortunes start to improve when he is taken up by the English-language magazine Merlin and then by Jerome Lindon, head of the French publishing house Editions de Minuit. He might have said to them what he later wrote to his American publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press: “I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for.”
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments