George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn
and Lois More Overbeck
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956 Volume 2
Cambridge UP, 2011
886 Pages
£30
ISBN 978-0521867948

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The “siege in the room” is one of the most productive periods of literary achievement by a single author in history. From 1946 to 1950, Samuel Beckett entered a new phase of writing that brought him unprecedented recognition, not least from the notoriously hard-to-please Jean Blanzat reviewing Molloy for the Figaro Littéraire: “[…]pouvoir dire, au moins une fois dans sa vie, qu’un grand écrivain vient d’apparaître”. During this time, Beckett revolutionised the novel with three works—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—not to mention four other astounding nouvelles; and transformed the course of modern drama with Waiting for Godot while diverting his efforts from fiction. Readers will wonder: how on earth do the letters account for this?

Now I must buckle down to doing the wearisome tidying up of my play, which will probably be called En attendant Godot. Above all I must make sure that the anus is clear.

Fond regards,

Sam

[to Georges Duthuit, March 1949]

The scatological indifference is startling; and yet the author’s ambition to tidy up “holes” recurs again and again in this volume, providing an astonishingly fertile space for the excavation of persistence, loss, and discomfiture.

One might have assumed that this frenzy of creativity would require a break from letter-writing. Here, however, is the proof that his activity as a man of letters also grew. Stretching to almost 900 pages, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956 represents only 40% of the total number of letters written during those years. So what is missing?

Firstly, the letters Beckett sent to Josette and Henri Hayden while he was hiding in the Vaucluse. The recent purchaser of that collection has not permitted access and the hope remains that they will be released for inclusion in one of the subsequent volumes. One is less sure why passages have been left out of the exchange with Beckett’s American lover, Pamela Mitchell, when internal evidence suggests they have already been reproduced. It should also be noted that the letters that are included in this volume date from January 1945; not from 1941, as the title advertises. None of the few letters written during the Nazi Occupation up to the Liberation of Paris make “direct reference” to the work, such as the Watt notebooks.

Yet the range of correspondence in this second volume really begins under a climate of constant surveillance during which the Irish writer was pinned down and unable to move. The editors have accordingly opted in favour of historical continuity, despite the intervention of war, in ascribing to this volume the originary date of 1941 without the letters. Vital exchanges from this period are included but only in the general introduction. To Cornelius Cremin, first secretary of the Irish legation in Vichy, Beckett writes:

Have had prolonged interviews with the local Gendarmes, in their barracks 6 miles from here. My history almost day by day from my first setting foot in France. They can’t believe that I can be called Samuel and am not a Jew. Yesterday they took away my identity card I suppose to see if it had not been tampered with. My movements are restricted in the extreme, radius of ten kilometers about.

[11/10/1942]

And to Sean Murphy, the Irish minister to France, he adds eight months later:

But with regard to this constant prying into my identity, my past movements, my present movements, my means of existence, my mode of existence, why I am called Samuel, etc. etc.[…]when my only offence, I mean that of having clandestinely crossed the line of demarcation, has been judged in the police-court of Apt and presumably purged by the payment of a fine of 400 francs[…]You might even mention, if you could be so kind, that you believe me to be inoffensive.

[30/6/1943]

This relentless interrogation sets the scene for the more complex and divergent commitments that are explored in the volume after the Second World War. We are able to see how Beckett’s personal history clashes in fascinating ways with the histories of his addressees. Having risked his own life working for the French resistance cell, “Gloria SMH”, he maintains a positive relationship with Georges “Belmont” (previously Georges Pelorson), who collaborated with the Vichy Government. We learn that Beckett’s most heartfelt moments “spilling my guts out” and “unloading all this” (this from a man who preferred France at war to Ireland at peace) are aimed toward a figure who was regarded with considerable suspicion by the French cultural mainstream for his escape to the United States during the war period. Sometimes it is the figure of the art historian, as we saw with Thomas MacGreevy in the first volume, which is being pursued at all costs. These outpourings are just as powerfully felt in the ardent perfection of Beckett’s language-skills with Mania Péron, to whom letters now have to be addressed in the absence of her husband, Alfred. Fellow exchange-student “Alfy” had worked alongside the Irish author on the translation of Murphy and of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, and recruited Beckett to the resistance before he died on deportation from the Mauthausen concentration camp. As the letters progress, it becomes clearer how it is his basic commitment to others that Beckett is restructuring; and as the author becomes increasingly decentralised in his thinking, we are able to sense why Jérôme Lindon, so much more than a publisher to Beckett, went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature on the writer’s behalf.

The war continues to act as an enabling influence for Beckett. We appreciate how it disengages the special feelings of privation, allowing his muscular erudition to fall away into the kind of artistic achievement that we now associate with the writer’s minimalist style. It is interesting to note at the start of this volume how the editors have chosen to accentuate the saturation of James Joyce’s influence. The last letter that Beckett sent to Joyce (the day before Joyce died on 12 January 1941) is illustrated on a prefabricated lettercard “written” by means of struck out phrases, as was required during the Occupation. An uncanny tribute indeed to the latter’s technique.

The breadth of correspondence that follows is considerable. Recipients range from the Irish Republican rebel Ernie O’Malley to the shy Swiss novelist Robert Pinget; from the distinguished French magistrate and composer Edouard Coester to Simone de Beauvoir, who is judged to have overstepped her editorial duties with the abridgement of Beckett’s “Suite”: “You are giving me the chance to speak only to retract it before the words have had time to mean anything.” The author’s increasing contact with publishers in this volume, such as Peter Suhrkamp (head of S. Fischer Verlag and of the imprint Suhrkamp Verlag) allows us to gain real insight into the public recognition that emerges as Beckett is forced to consider aspects of adaptation, translation, directing, and performance beyond his occupation as a fiction writer. No one was more taken aback by this sudden shift in literary fortunes than Beckett himself, and many letters show him struggling to come to terms with these changes. The exchange with Michel Polac, head of Radiodiffusion Française, prompts an especially fruitful crisis:

It is not given to everyone to be able to move from the world that opens under the page to that of profit and loss, then back again, unperturbed, as if between the daily grind and the pub on the corner.

And he adds:

As for wanting to find in all this a wider and loftier meaning to take away after the show, along with the programme and the choc-ice, I am unable to see the point of it. But it must be possible.

[after January 23, 1952]

That final intimation reveals much about the way the author was eventually compelled to take over the stage as a director.

It should be noted that the general editors have overcome the pedantic tendencies of the first volume. The signs of emendation [for and sic] that caused interruptions to reading have now been mostly removed, without any cost in distortion to the understanding. The pruning of unnecessary biographical detail (where parts of that knowledge could be assumed for major figures) in favour of well-placed individual illustrations, like that of Alexander Trocchi, has also enhanced the book’s excellent appearance overall. New problems have been introduced, however, by the enormous number of French translations, especially those required by the Beckett–Duthuit exchanges that form the bulk of this volume. These cause real spatial constraints and pose difficult questions for an English language edition.

The demand for translation is not supported by Beckett’s own reading of literature, which takes place in the original language. Furthermore, his movement to rural France—firstly, to Roussillon-sur-Apt in the Vaucluse during the Occupation, and later to Ussy-sur-Marne after the war—refracts a tongue beyond that of the cultivated Parisian. The inventive side of the author’s linguistic development results in additional difficulties with syntax, regardless of the pains he takes elsewhere in refinement and perfection. Some of the most excited passages in discussion with Duthuit might be perceived as untranslatable. How can one translate those words that “lie” in speaking their author? And how does one account for extracts of the original correspondence on which Beckett’s meaning remains contextually, and playfully, unstable?

The translator, George Craig, is to be praised for taking on such tasks and many more in this volume. Thoroughly aware of Beckett’s self-translations, he has allowed the English to preserve its distance from the French by sensing (without anticipating) the author’s feverish desire to combine various inflections and registers. Craig’s ability to resist “turning the unusual into the usual so that it won’t read like a translation” (as Beckett wryly notes of Erich Franzen’s version of Molloy in this volume) will impress readers, as does his capacity to separate the author’s self-depreciations from his more considered judgements. One wonders, however, presuming that most readers approaching this book will have some French, whether all of the secondary passages (those not written by Beckett) needed to be translated, and whether that could have freed up more space for the author.

Francis Hutton-Williams is reading for a DPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford.

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“Any fool can write a novel but it takes a real genius to sell it”… J.G. Ballard, who died last week at 78, could write and sell. (Empire of the Sun sailed off the shelves after Steven Spielberg made it into a movie—with Christian Bale starring as the young Ballard.) But publisher HarperCollins announced last week that it had scrapped plans to sell the latest Ballard book because Ballard himself could not write it. The novelist, who lost a long battle against prostate cancer, had hoped that his last work would reveal “the meaning, if any, of life”.

In the wake of HarperCollins’s announcement, it appears that the coda to the Ballardian canon will be “The Dying Fall”, which the Guardian published this week. In it, the Leaning Tower of Pisa comes crashing down. While Pisa falls, Rome is resurgent, according to the Times Literary Supplement. Reviewer Rupert Shortt argues that the Catholic Church remains “remarkably robust”. Catholicism may be losing its dominance within Europe, but Europeans are losing their dominance within Catholicism: “The future conversation about Catholicism in the twenty-first century will be conducted increasingly by Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians.” In short(t), one might say that a tectonic shift is taking place at the heart of the Catholic world—but alas, that would be tasteless.

It’s not just Catholicism that is “resurgent”. God Is Back, say Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in the title of their newest book. “To anyone who lives outside Europe, the Harvard campus or Manhattan… this conclusion is not exactly startling,” observes the New York Times. Elsewhere, He never went away.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that Barack Obama won the presidency in part because he could speak about God more genuinely than his rivals. But although Obama talks about the Lord, he doesn’t talk about the Bard, according to the New York Times Week in Review. This is despite the fact that he lists Shakespeare’s Tragedies among his favourite books on Facebook.

Perhaps Obama’s decision to steer clear of Shakespeare in his speeches represents a shrewd side-stepping of a brewing Beltway brouhaha. Apparently, the Supreme Court’s liberal lion, John Paul Stevens, has teamed up with the cantankerous conservative Antonin Scalia to prove that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The more moderate Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy defend Stratford-upon-Avon’s claim. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is leaning towards John Florio.

“Any fool can write a novel”, but how many can write two? The Times lists the top 10 “literary one-hit wonders” of all time. Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, doesn’t make the list—although there are Poe followers (including Baudelaire and Borges) who probably would have put it there. Edgar Allen is all the rage in his bicentennial year, and a flock of new biographers are ravenously reaping the rewards. Poe might be a more appropriate Supreme Court subject than Shakespeare: as Jill Lepore notes in the New Yorker, the author died while committing voter fraud: “Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed.”

Speaking of nevermore… J.G. Ballard. The dystopian writer predicted that with each passing generation, the life of man would grow duller. The TLS’s Michael Hoffman concludes that with each passing generation, the life of the Manns grew duller. Thomas’s brother (Heinrich) and sister-in-law (Nelly) are “certainly an interesting enough couple to justify a biography”. Thomas’s oldest children—Klaus and Erika—probably aren’t “worth writing books about at all”. WH Auden and Chester Kallman may have had it right when they quipped that the eldest son of Thomas was a “Subordinate Klaus”.

Although the Manns grew duller over the generations, the Vanderbilts did not. The San Francisco Chronicle reviews The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and concludes that Cornelius was “not a nice person”. The railroad robber baron fathered eleven children and practically disinherited all but one—son William, whom he left with $95 million of his $100 million fortune. William’s descendants continue to dominate the headlines. William’s great-granddaughter, 85-year-old Gloria, has written a new novel that the not-so-Puritan New York Post calls “unadulterated smut”. When Gloria writes of sex, she does so knowingly: her past lovers include Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and the author Wyatt Emory Cooper—with whom she spawned CNN heartthrob Anderson Cooper.

Speaking of unadulterated smut, the Times’s Michael Moorcock recalls the saga of J.G. Ballard’s 1968 pamphlet entitled “Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan”. The pamphlet posed the question: why did the then-California governor have such sex appeal? Meanwhile, James Mann (no relation to Thomas) poses the question: why did Ronald Reagan appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev? The Telegraph highlights the role of…(John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, see supra, will love this)…God. Reagan was convinced that Gorbachev was a “closet Christian”.

Defying members of his own party, Reagan went to Moscow. Samuel Beckett, however, did not. In the New York Review of Books, JM Coetzee peruses a new volume of Beckett letters (see Stephen Ross on the same volume in Oxonian Review 8.7)—including the young Beckett’s audacious overture to Sergei Eisenstein: “I write to you…to ask to be considered for admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography,” Beckett wrote in 1936, before acknowledging that “I have no experience of studio work.” Beckett waited for a reply. Fittingly, it never arrived.

Wait no longer… Blackwell announced last week that it would participate in a three-month trial of the Espresso Book Machine, which can print any one of 400,000 titles in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately for the OR, the bookseller has decided to debut Espresso at its Charing Cross branch instead of its Broad Street flagship. Oxford overlooked again? John Paul Stevens would not be pleased.

]]> http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/review-of-reviews-3/feed/ 0 http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/shining-agates-of-negation/ http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/shining-agates-of-negation/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:14:39 +0000 Paul Sonne http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/?p=2961 Stephen Ross

M.D. Fehsenfeld, L.M. Overbeck, D. Gunn and G. Craig (eds.)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), vol. 1
Cambridge University Press, 2009
782 pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-0521867931

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On the night of 6 January 1938, Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a French pimp named Robert-Jules Prudent while walking home with friends. Narrowly missing his left lung and heart, the blow confined him to a Paris hospital for over two weeks. When Beckett later met the improbably named Prudent in court and asked why he had attacked, the Frenchman responded wryly: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse (I don’t know why, sir. I’m sorry).” In hindsight, it all seems like an episode out of one of Beckett’s own plays, highlighting as it does the absurd contingency of life, the untoward and irrational behaviour of the down-and-out.

Amused by his assailant’s response and ever wary of guarding his privacy, Beckett chose not to press charges. In a gesture of qualified compassion, he had already written from the hospital to his friend Thomas McGreevy that he found his assailant “more cretinous than malicious”. Because Beckett never divulged his inner feelings about the episode, we can only surmise the extent to which it coloured his imagination and might have prompted the composition of later masterpieces of human dejection like Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957).

Had Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) not survived his stabbing, he would be largely forgotten today. His legacy would comprise a few poems, short stories and a novel, Murphy, the proofs of which he corrected while convalescing from his stabbing. Yet, as James Knowlson indicates in the title of his 1996 biography, Beckett was “damned to fame”, living to the age of 83 and writing some of the most important plays and novels of the 20th century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His wife, Suzanne, called the prize “a catastrophe” for the intensely private Beckett.

But for Beckett’s fans, the nitty-gritty facts of his private life have always held great interest. Now, with the arrival of the long-awaited Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), the first in a projected four-volume collection of Beckett’s correspondence, interest in Beckett “the man” only promises to increase. This is not a bad thing at all, as the letters will likely draw readers to Beckett’s more neglected early works, like the superb Murphy.

Letters concerned with the more intimate and potentially scurrilous details of Beckett’s early life, particularly his numerous romantic involvements, have been culled for the most part by the editors, owing more to the enormous mass of letters (over 15,000) in the Beckett archive than to any prudish censorial agenda. We are not spared, however, intimate details of the various ailments Beckett suffered during this period, from “sebaceous cysts” and “lumps between the wind and the water” to “heart palpitations” that seem to have put a provisional fear of God in him. The letters suggest that Beckett was either uncomfortable all the time or a pathological hypochondriac.

For the most part, though, the letters document Beckett’s alternately joyous and miserable youthful peregrinations through Ireland, France, England and Germany as a student, lecturer, tutor, fledgling writer and exquisite loafer. We find him straining to discipline himself as a writer and undertaking a rigorous programme of self-education in the arts and humanities, ranging from European literature and philosophy to music, foreign language, theatre, visual art and even film.

Fittingly, the first two entries in the volume—short, factual notes—are addressed to James Joyce, whom Beckett affectionately dubs “Shem” or “the Penman” in his letters to friends. Beckett was Joyce’s most gifted disciple, working as one of his research assistants for “Work in Progress” (later titled Finnegans Wake) and publishing essays in support of Joyce’s experimental style. He met Joyce in Paris in 1928 through his close friend, confidante and fellow writer, Thomas McGreevy, who is, incidentally, the most frequent addressee in this collection.

Beckett laboured under Joyce’s shadow early on, writing to his friend Samuel Putnam in 1932: “I vow I will get over J.J. before I die. Yessir.” But even more pressing than Beckett’s anxiety of Joycean influence was his concern to overcome the inherited limitations of his own style and mother tongue, namely, the unavoidable stylishness and obtuseness of his English writing. A 1937 letter to Beckett’s acquaintance Axel Kaun illuminates this point:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. . . . 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.

The letter is noteworthy not only because it captures the stylistic underpinnings of his later work, but because it was originally written in German. Indeed, Beckett wrote letters both in passable German and in impeccable French, with snatches of Italian and Latin scattered throughout. Fortunately for non-readers of German, French, Latin and Italian (to name just the major languages that appear), the editors have translated every foreign-language letter, phrase and free-standing word into English.

Beckett’s linguistic brilliance must not be overlooked, particularly because it is so much at odds with his impulse toward linguistic minimalism. How did he balance these opposing qualities in himself? Simply put, he did not, but grappled with stylistic questions his whole career, paring his voice down again and again. Reading the passage above, we come to understand Beckett’s motives for composing much of his post-World War II work in French, notably Waiting for Godot, Endgame and the novel “trilogy” Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). For Beckett, writing in French satisfied an artistic imperative to lay bare the “something or nothing” lurking behind language, an imperative that writing in English seemed to preclude. He aspired to a style-less style that, in its linguistic impoverishment, would raise ideas of negation, impotence and nothingness to a kind of sublime.

Of course, Beckett’s artistic interests extended far beyond literature. In early 1936, Beckett wrote to Sergei Eisenstein, a film director in Moscow, asking to be taken on as his assistant. While Beckett admitted to having no experience of studio work, he wrote, rather clunkily: “It is because I realise that the script is function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of [scenario and editing work].” Although Beckett never heard back from Eisenstein, the letter gestures toward Beckett’s later commitment to drama, the medium for which he is now best known. Beckett went on to write and direct several short films.

We also find him keen to register his opinions about music. In a letter to his cousin, Morris Sinclair, he confesses an inability to make peace with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, into which the composer “poured everything that was vulgar, facile and childish in him”. Beckett does speak glowingly, however, of Beethoven’s last String Quartet in F (opus 135), which he saw performed in 1934; Beckett was particularly gripped by the epigraph of the final movement: “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss / Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein! (The heart-wrenching decision / Must it be? / It must be! / It must be!”) One is reminded of the final lines of Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

One could go on listing for pages and pages Beckett’s meditations on art (“I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats—squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands”), politics (“Germany is horrible”, written on 13 December 1936) and life (“It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt”). But that would spoil the fun of perusing this volume and finding for oneself such “shining agates of negation”, to appropriate one of Beckett’s phrases in an early letter. At nearly 800 pages and bulwarked with extensive introductory and biographical material, this first volume is a formidable work of scholarship, destined to assume its rightful place beside The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats and the Letters of James Joyce as essential reading of 20th century Anglophone literature.

The iconic image of Beckett as a wizened, austere prophet of the barrenness and inhuman desolation of the modern world is dispelled, or at least qualified, on nearly every page of this epistolary portrait of a prodigiously gifted, neurotic, humane, and, malgré lui, ineluctably human writer. As he writes in the last letter in the volume (in French) to Marthe Arnaud: “You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky.”

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford.