Ferdinand Mount

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, 1941-56, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck

The die was miscast from the start, more’s the pity. As we reach the halfway point in this massy four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett, I cannot stifle a small sigh or whimper, of the type exhaled by one of those Beckett characters buried up to their necks. And there is no one to blame but the author of the letters. For it was Beckett himself who in his letter of 18 March, 1985, gave his blessing to Martha Fehsenfeld ‘to edit my correspondence in the sense agreed on, i.e. its reduction to those passages only having bearing on my work’. So the tussle began and continued long after the author’s death four years later.

 What did ‘only having bearing on my work’ mean exactly? Jérôme Lindon, Beckett’s loyal French publisher and his literary executor, maintained that the letters published should be restricted to those which specifically mentioned Beckett’s individual works or his oeuvre. Nothing else was to be included. Even after Lindon died in 2001 and Beckett’s nephew Edward took over as literary executor, the argument went on, and goes on. The editors believe, for example, that Beckett’s frequent, at times obsessive, moanings about his health — his feet, his heart palpitations, his assorted boils and cysts — are of direct relevance to his work. The estate of Samuel Beckett disagrees.

Sam himself would, I fancy, have chuckled a dry chuckle at the thought of his pallbearers wrangling over his pustules. He does say, though, in a letter of 1955 to the young French avant-garde novelist Robert Pinget that ‘I have always been uncompromising and I have sometimes regretted it.’ Might he perhaps have rued his decision on the letters if he had lived to see the trouble it has caused?

‘Reduction’ was the word he used, and reduction is what we get.

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