What one really hoped for from the letters of the young Beckett were, first, some kind of intimation of the huge wit and gusto which make Murphy and Watt so irresistible — a ‘riot of highbrow fun’, as an early reviewer very truly put it. That, I’m afraid, just isn’t here, and you have to conclude that Beckett was not one of those writers, like Waugh, whose comic invention was perpetually spilling over into all he wrote. Secondly, one hoped for some kind of anticipation of the later masterpieces, and here, with some ingenuity, there are traces to be found — a pair of American women with ‘foreskin hats’, or this: ‘Through the wall come female Danish voices, two Jutland tarts in colloquy. Pure chirping. They should be on a funeral urn.’ There, for once, speaks the future author of Not I. For the rest of it, we read the blurb’s assertion that Beckett was ‘the only writer who can sum up the agonies and ecstasies of the 20th century’ with some amazement. On this beautifully edited and annotated evidence, he had very little to say about it.

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