The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Martha Dow Fehsenfeld (Editor), Lois More Overbeck (Editor), Dan Gunn (Editor), George Craig (Editor)
Key Phrases: middling women, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, gate theatre, New York, Samuel Beckett, George Reavey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Shuffled among publishers for too long, the selected letters of the great Irish novelist and playwright Beckett (1906-1989) are finally here, the first in a projected four-volume set. Beckett, known for his love of silence and texts that attenuated to nearly nothing, was a veritable letter-writing machine, though only his letters to director Alan Schneider have been previously collected; this project may well represent the last great corpus of typed and handwritten correspondence from a literary giant. Beginning with two letters from the then-unpublished 23-year-old to James Joyce (helping the master with some Greek translations), and ending with a short note describing a Bram Van Velde painting seen just before the Nazis took Paris, Beckett struggles valiantly, endlessly, to find himself (included is a 1936 request for admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography). There's much to discover, including Beckett's relations with forgotten Irish poet Thomas McGreevy and some explicit shop talk, including a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun in which he outlines his ambition: "to drill one hole after another into the English language until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through." Accompanied by smart, exhaustive notes, chronologies and solid bios of all correspondents, this collection will no doubt deepen Beckett scholarship, as well as fans' appreciation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda Admirers of Samuel Beckett, arguably the greatest writer in English of the second half of the 20th century, have grown used to waiting for Godot, who will surely come tomorrow or, just possibly, the day after. In the meantime, these similarly anticipated letters have quite definitely arrived, and in an edition more sumptuous than one ever imagined. Has any modern author been better served by his editors than Beckett? When completed, this four-book set will include approximately 2,500 letters, chosen from some 15,000 written over 60 years. Just the introductions, chronologies, indexes and biographical profiles of Beckett's friends and associates take up nearly 200 pages of this initial volume. Best of all, each letter is annotated in detail, with every person, event and allusion scrupulously identified. While young Sam grouses about the "usual drink & futility" or complains that Proust is "strangely uneven," his editors crisply inform us that Beckett owned the 1926 Salani edition of Dante, that "bougie" is an old French word for catheter, that Bernardo Bibbiena's "La Calandra" was "perhaps the most scurrilous play of the 1400s," and that the customs duty on overcoats was 60 percent of value, "unless personally owned and substantially worn," as was Beckett's. No surprise there. A shop actually refused to mend the young expatriate's worn-out shoes. But, as he told a friend, "I can still wear them on very dry days." In 1928 Beckett, freshly graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in French and Italian, arrives in Paris to teach English at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Soon he is writing to James Joyce, who enlists him for occasional research on "Finnegans Wake," and soon, too, he is fending off the advances of Joyce's schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, who once told him to "accept the world and go to parties." Notwithstanding the round spectacles, bristly hair, gangly physique and those dilapidated shoes, Beckett seems to have been highly attractive to women (and not only in the 1930s: Susan Sontag once called him the sexiest man she had ever met). Setting aside Lucia Joyce's largely undesired attentions, in this decade Beckett enjoys love affairs with, among others, a cousin; the rich heiress Peggy Guggenheim; and finally Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who will eventually become his wife. Most of this correspondence, however, is directed to male friends, with whom Beckett discusses his reading, visits to museums and concerts, and various physical and mental travails. He tells one correspondent that he admires Schopenhauer for his "intellectual justification of unhappiness -- the greatest that has ever been attempted." Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," he concludes, is "full of clichés & journalese: but the movement, the transitions! . . . No one ever caught the insanity of dialogue like he did." He calls Jane Austen "divine" and confesses that "I think she has much to teach me." Of Goethe's "Faust," he complains that "there seems to be a surprising amount of irrelevance for the work of a lifetime." He orders the complete works of Kant in German, reads Latin philosophy, judges Sartre's "Nausea" as "extraordinarily good." Again and again, Beckett gripes that he "can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture." He speaks -- in a very Beckettian manner -- of his "wild way of failing to say what I imagine I want to say." And yet in this decade of apprenticeship he produces a major essay on Joyce, a monograph on Proust, the prize-winning poem "Whoroscope," a long unpublished work of fiction called "Dream of Fair to Middling Women," the short stories of "More Pricks Than Kicks" and his extremely funny philosophical first novel, "Murphy." He also tries and fails to write a play about Samuel Johnson -- and then agrees to translate the Marquis de Sade's "The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom" (but the project falls through). Despite all this industry and accomplishment, Beckett makes various lackluster attempts to find a Real Job. He tries to land a curatorship at Ireland's National Gallery of Art; he writes to the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, asking to be taken on as his student; he inquires about a position teaching French in a technical school in Rhodesia and applies to the University of Cape Town for a professorship of Italian. At one point, Beckett even thinks of becoming a commercial pilot, explaining that "I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read," then adding, characteristically, "It is not as though I wanted to write them." Alongside literature, his other great subjects are his health and art. He suffers from cysts and boils, heart palpitations, intestinal pains and mysterious trouble with his anus. Some of his teeth need to be extracted, he spends a long (and useless) period in psychoanalysis, and he comes close to dying after being stabbed in the chest by a crazed panhandler. When not bedridden or feeling sorry for himself, Beckett is usually looking at art, especially from the 17th-century Netherlands. In 1936-37 he even spends six months in Germany just going around to galleries, churches and museums: Of one obscure figure -- van der Werff -- he enticingly notes that his work is so pornographic that it "would make Fragonard look like Fra Angelico." Among contemporary painters, he deeply admires the landscapes of Jack B. Yeats, brother to the poet. His favorite correspondent is Thomas McGreevy, a future director of Ireland's National Gallery. Still, it is to a young German, Axel Kaun, that Beckett writes the best known letter in this collection, a kind of apologia for his future life as an artist: "It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. . . . Language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. . . . To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through -- I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer." Eventually, Samuel Beckett tore apart language and human existence in a series of masterpieces, most of them originally written in French and culminating in the gasped breaths of "How It Is," where people spend their solitary lives crawling through mud in the impenetrable dark. At the end of this first volume of letters, though, the future Nobel laureate chooses to stay in Paris, even as the German armies overrun France. Soon he will join the now almost legendary Resistance cell known as Gloria SMH. Writing will have to wait.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 882 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (February 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521867932
• ISBN-13: 978-0521867931
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,797 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Waiting Is Over, March 6, 2009

By	D. Kammerman - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The wait is finally over! Nearly twenty years after Beckett's death, we at last glimpse the first foot of this four-volume beast. And what a remarkable thing _The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940_ is. Whether you're a serious student of twentieth-century literature and theater already familiar with the tremendous force of Beckett's novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and translations, have a passing association with the extraordinary worlds Beckett created in such landmark works as _Waiting for Godot_ and _Endgame_, or are a relative newcomer simply curious about one of the most prolific, interesting, talented, and famous writers of the twentieth century, this brilliant collection of Beckett's early letters offers vast resources and captivating treasures for you.

Beyond the sheer number and scope of the letters--written from Paris, Dublin, London, Berlin to friends, family members, publishers, and a plethora of others, and opening a hitherto unseen window onto the private life and thoughts of Beckett--what most impresses is the portrait of the author they draw. Of course, there is his incredible erudition: his facility and playfulness with a number of different languages, his extensive knowledge of literature throughout history and role in the literature of his day, his far-reaching and astonishing discernment about the fine arts. The letters themselves are astoundingly well-written gems, showing Beckett's ability to craft deeply contemplative, mellifluous, and puckish prose all at once. Perhaps even more noteworthy, however, is that the humor and generosity suffusing the letters belie the unfortunately commonplace perception that Beckett's work is predominantly pessimistic, full of despair, etc. The Beckett we meet through the _Letters_ is an intelligent, thoughtful, and kind young man laboring to make his way and his name, attentive to those closest to him and to the rapidly changing world in which he was writing. Indeed, the _Letters_ abound with a playfulness, graciousness, generosity, self-effacing reticence, and quick-wit that leaves the reader subtly smiling with delight and admiration more often than one might expect.

This is not to say that we don't find despair and shadows falling over the exposed corners of hope, as well as bile and a whole host of other bodily fluids, both routine and of sickness. However, through them pushes the relentless twinkle of good humor and facetiousness that ultimately gave us such lines as "I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" (the very end of _The Unnamable_) or "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new" (the very beginning of _Murphy_) or, more contemporary with _The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940_, the moment of Belacqua's wonderful epiphany, "splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash," that "he had been abusing himself all these years in relating the strength of cheese directly to its greenness" (from "Dante and the Lobster").

The notes are copious and dense with helpful details about the characters in Beckett's life, publication histories, translations, his travels, and the mind-bogglingly vast literary and artistic references made in the letters. A word of advice to the reader not immediately or wholly entrenched in academic research or the labyrinths of twentieth-century literary history: read the letters first and then go back and read the notes--almost as though they were a separate book. In fact, you really get two books in one here: the letters and the notes. The notes are indeed so full of compelling information that only the most disciplined reader can keep his or her eye from constantly wandering away from the letters themselves. Yet, in doing so, one often loses the hypnotizing melody and wonderful resonance of Beckett's phrases. This is, above all, a beautiful book and the beginning of an extraordinary testimony to both the work and the man.

I could go on, but instead a bit of a letter as an amuse-bouche. About his "Sedendo and Quiescendo," Beckett writes to Charles Prentice, alluding to everything from bowel movements to Dante's _Paradiso_:
"When I imagine I have a real `twice round the pan & pointed at both ends' I'll offend you with its spiral on my soilman's shovel. I'm glad to have the thing back again in the dentist's chair. I still believe there's something to be done with it.
"I have just finished what I might describe as a whore's get version of Walking Out, the story I spoke to you of in London, & sent it to Pinker who won't be able to place it but will be annoyed I hope. That old dada is narrowing down at last to an apex and then I hope it will develop seven spectral petals."

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Rating the quality of the printing and binding, April 8, 2009

By	M. Held - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940

This review expresses my profound disappointment with the manufacture of the book.

The letters of Beckett are a joy to read but the publisher has made it as difficult as possible. The book is glued (as most books are today) rather than sewn, which makes it hard to hold open. The paper used is dead white---very hard on the eyes---rather than off-white. The margins, especially the inside margin, are narrow. There are pages and pages of notes (sometimes several consecutive pages) set in not very well printed 8-point type (quite small) with very little space between the lines---very hard to read (and they are essential to read). As to the binding: it is not cloth but colored paper over board, which means that once the jacket disappears, the hinges will quickly bruise.

Time was a Cambridge U.P. would manufacture a decent book, especially with an author as distinguished as this one. Very disappointing. To those who haven't purchased it yet, I would wait for the paperback. It will probably last just as long.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A writer finding his voice, May 6, 2009

By	las cosas (Ajijic-San Francisco) - See all my reviews

Beckett is intensely concerned with language throughout these letters, and it is fascinating to see him experiment with words and different languages. He is also a serious student of art and music and in a single letter will riff between a sonata, a poem and a painting. It is fascinating to read his explanations of what he is seeing, what he is trying to do. For example, seldom have I encountered as many obsessive descriptions of how paintings are hung in a gallery. Or venom for careless restorations.

And the efforts to obtain a publisher for his novel Murphy! It is an inventory of UK publishers that turn down the book, including the "private asylum Hogarth." Yet he is a kind correspondent, always concerned with the person to whom he is writing, even if it is his hapless agent.

He spends several months during 1937 visiting museums and galleries in Germany, and he provides an eerie description of museums with large numbers of "degenerate" works removed from the galleries, and often available for private viewings in the basement, or in the private home of a Jewish collector.

But these are asides. The main focus of these letters is the struggle of the young Beckett to find his voice in a world that had little interest in what he had to say, and provided little opportunity of earning a living. The publisher of his first book of poems sends him the annual statement of sales, recording 2 copies sold in the previous year.

But he plows on, writing careful, thoughtful, generous letters to a wide group of friends and others, and in those letters we are given the rare opportunity of seeing a great and original mind find a language and a voice.

I did not think much of the obsessive footnotes. The introduction explained the tortuous history of the letters, and along the way the project accumulated way too many scholars. The footnotes are endless, and completely without a human touch. Name, dates, a few words about the person. Endlessly I turned to the footnotes hoping for some explanation of this person's relationship with Beckett, or just some gossip. But no, nothing human, ever. And I would happily have avoided the footnotes except that a vast number of Beckett letter are included solely in the footnotes.