The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957–1965 edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 816pp, £30 (hardback)

Echo’s Bones, Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, 2014, 160pp, £20 (hardback)

Beckett’s Letters are a joy to read. They reveal a man untouched by his growing fame as novelist and dramatist. He is very aware that increasing publicity may harm his capacity to maintain the quality of his writing and the range he expects of himself, from the broad expanse of the novel and the confining form of the lyric to new ventures in stage, in film, television and radio. This lack of self-conceit, of attentiveness to the dangers of complacency, leads him (in November 1958) to write to his American publisher: ‘The only chance for me now as a writer is to go into retreat and put a stop to all this fucking élan acquis and get back down to the bottom of all the hills again’. Requests and invitations from academics, directors and actors for clarification of his work press an increasing burden on his time and patience, and although he is kind-hearted (and, in some cases, Machiavellian) enough in most instances to respond, he remains alert to the wider question – what will the effect of all this be on his own ability to work? And it is a necessary self-guarding interrogation for a writer who always found the process difficult. So it is we find him communicating to various correspondents, telling them he has to retreat to the countryside (to Ussy-sur-Marne – but even there he writes that ‘the tomb will be lively after here’) if he is to find the peace to write at all; only through ‘the self-banishment of writing’ can he succeed in his work; he cavils about his ‘intermittent banging against listening (?) walls’ (the characteristic bracketed question-mark appearing even as Waiting for Godot is staged across the world); the fear of ‘drying up’ – ‘I don’t think there is much work left in me. Everything I try aborts. I’ll keep trying’ (the tone very close to that of his primary protagonists in his major novels and plays); he confesses ‘I am as hollow as an old radish. I would like to spend two months in the country digging holes’, sounding for all the world like one of his own characters full of the pathos of nullity. This tone of voice is important to the reader for one very good reason – it overrules Beckett’s own reasoning (expressed throughout the Letters) that critics of his work lean too heavily on a supposed relation to his life when he himself states ‘I really never had any’ – or ‘any’ that he does have is just ‘putain de vie’ (a ‘bloody awful life’). The irony, of course, lies just there – it is that very negativity which propels his vast canvas – that familiar groundscape of amnesia, anaesthesia and inertia we associate with his name.

In his Letters Beckett shows himself to be a very astute businessman and careful negotiator in his dealings with publishers and with theatre proprietors, whilst at the same time saving himself unnecessary exertion. Invited to see a film of Finnegans Wake, for example, he replies, ‘neither for love nor even money’ would he be dragged to it. Elsewhere we find the note of Bartleby the Scrivener: ‘Offer of a film of Godot by Bergman. Prefer not’. Even his notes to directors are kept to a laconic minimum (reflecting the sparseness required of his stagecraft?): ‘Moonlight. Ashcan a little left of centre. Enter man left, limping, with stick’. The Beckett we see here, however, is far from being a hermit – we see him very much caught up in the social milieu of the theatre, travelling across Europe and the States in a gregarious frame of mind, directing his own plays and taking an active interest in others’ (such as Pinter’s, for example). He is also keenly aware of political issues, insisting, for example, that in South Africa his plays be performed only before non-segregated audiences.

The biggest problem facing Beckett in these Letters is that of the censor (a personage who rarely rears his head in contemporary life, thankfully). He appears in various guises (in Canada, England, Ireland, France) blocking publication or production of his novels or plays. He refers to the breed en masse as ‘licensing grocers’ and, in particular (regarding Endgame), ‘In London the Lord Chamberpot demands inter alia the removal of the entire prayer scene. I’ve told him to buckingham off’. His Trilogy(the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) is seized at a Dublin bookshop by the police at the behest (as Beckett sees it) of ‘those Roman Catholic bastards in Ireland’. What is interesting here again for the reader is the extent to which Beckett seems to be unaware of his capacity to upset conventional morals, the degree to which his own bile doesn’t suit ‘the authorities’. This is a particularly relevant point when one considers that it is only now that the short story Echo’s Bones sees the light of day, after being originally rejected for publication by Charles Prentice (of Chatto and Windus) in 1933. Neither the editor of this text, nor the editors of the Letters, cite censorship as the reason for the previous ‘muffling’ of this brave work. Prentice admitted that the story gave him ‘the jim-jams’ (it was meant to be the eleventh story in More Pricks Than Kicks, but never appeared). There is no sense that the young Beckett regarded Prentice in any form as a ‘censor’ at all, but that’s just what he was. He thought the story ‘nightmarish’ – and not only for aesthetic reasons, I surmise. I’m sure he could see his press being shut down by the authorities if he published it.Echo’s Bones is the tale of Belacqua (the main protagonist, resurrected from an earlier story, ‘Yellow’), a dead homosexual lost in the shades of Purgatory. Belacqua describes his own history as ‘a fagpiece’, and there are hundreds of references to pederastic acts throughout the tale – and this I’m certain scared Prentice off. A certain type of prudishness even prevents the contemporary commentator from making proper annotations. Mark Nixon (who provides fifty-six pages of notes to a fifty-one page text!) glosses the character Baron Extravas, for instance, thus: “‘extra vas, ab ore, parte poste’. Latin terms meaning ‘outside his vessel’, ‘by mouth’, and ‘from behind’”. Surely it just means ‘extra Vaseline’, or possibly (with more ramification) ‘spare no expense’ (‘extravagance’). Priggishness, it seems, has not been entirely eliminated from the literary scene after all. ‘Baron’ should be straightforward enough. The ‘General Index’ to the Letters is not without its own (unconscious) Beckettian manoeuvres. Watt himself would clearly have cherished ‘Dante, see Alighieri, Dante’, ‘Michelangelo, see Buonarroti, Michelangelo’, but even he could not have stretched himself so far as to gloss ‘Elysian’, ‘bole’, ‘priapean’, ‘bald as a coot’ (‘proverbial’!), ‘dunderhead’, and so on, as Nixon does in Echo’s Bones. Any reader stumbling over these words is hardly going to progress far in reading Beckett. There appears to be little awareness of the covert joke implied in Beckett cannibalising this story for his later book of poems Echo’s Bones and other Precipitates (1935) – echoes of echo’s bones, as it were, and that he has deliberately infringed Shakespeare’s injunction, ‘Cursed be he that moves my bones’. In looking up the eclectic references, the editor misses the obvious ones. One could go further – ‘Echo’s Bones’ comes from Ovid’s Metamophoses and we know that Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid was Shakespeare’s bedside reading. Now you might think none of this matters, but it is a theme which occupies Beckett greatly in the story—that somehow detail matters, as it does in The Waste Land for example. The shadowless spirit sitting on the fence talking to Baron Extravas in Echo’s Bones states quite clearly his view that critics, commentators and academic reviewers are ‘a nest of rank outsiders mending in perfect amity a hard place in Eliot’. Here we can see Beckett second-guessing his own interpreters, and sticking the knife in in advance. It makes uncomfortable reading for would-be annotators that should alert them to certain dangers of probing too far into what Beckett calls (in the Letters) the ‘sacred things of writing’ (Dante’s ‘le segrete cose’). In this sense, I regard Prentice as a finer reader than any of them, for spotting the at times egregious blasphemies evident in Beckett’s story of 1933. The blasphemy matters – it prevented the publication of the story. The abiding themes ofEcho’s Bones are whoredom, pederasty, self-abuse, syphilis and gonorrhoea, more overt than in Joyce, but not mentioned by Prentice as a reason for turning the text down. There is a clear parody of Christianity on page thirty-seven of the story: ‘This man Doyle was naked save for his truss and a pair of boots which sparkled and crackled in the moonlight. He wore tatooed in block capitals of fire, a flaming zoster across his tumtum, the words: Stultum Propter Christum’; and there is a clear debunking of Christ’s own words to Thomas when Beckett writes (on page five) that the whore Zaborovna beckons to Belacqua ‘frankly alluring him to come and doubt not’, much as later on Peter is recalled when the dead spirit tells us the sun ‘gives light to the cock’. Only Prentice seems to have perceived the offence this might cause amongst certain sensibilities.

But this is only half the case. There is a sense in which one feels Beckett would have preferred (bearing Shakespeare’s injunction in mind) Echo’s Bones never to have been dug up at all. As early as 1933 he was writing to Thomas MacGreevy that he thought the story ‘all jigsaw and I am not interested’. By the time we reach the fifties, he is informing his correspondents that he can’t bring himself to read the early stories of More Pricks Than Kicks (and these are the published ones – not the one that was rejected!), ‘preferring them never to see the light of day’ – ‘wouldn’t open More Pricks for a king’s ransom’, regretting what he sees as youthful ‘cantankerous overstatement’, ‘work that was wrung out of him’. The Beckett Estate clearly views the matter differently, and I think they are right. We need Echo’s Bones. As Nixon rightly argues, it prefigures many of the post-war texts, and shows us the genesis of genius, his inimitable, unique style. Here we have ‘eyes out on stalks like a sentinel-crab’, ‘it was high time for a pause to ensue and a long one did’, life as ‘hypnosis … possession of being well deceived’, happiness ‘apprehensible only as a lack’, the purgatorial walking ‘stark staring naked’, heroism now not ‘a quiver of arrows’ but ‘a bagful of putters’. Belacqua is ‘a sensible cadaver’ knowing no more now than he did when alive, sensible only of death having ‘done the dirty on him’, having been ‘bumped off’, it seems, ‘by a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons’. He finds himself ‘uninjurable’, the word ringing in the void’s inaudibilities as ‘uninsurable’ (possibly), or more likely, ‘unendurable’ (in the Letters we find Beckett describing Brecht’s Die Mutter as ‘Unendurable’), resonances nowhere to be found in Nixon’s notes. Oh yes, and the Dantean ‘shoals of angels’ which pass over the River Styx by the very modern convenience of submarine, as all the while Belacqua regrets not having committed suicide, telling us ‘he could not go on’ – as later also The Unnamable. Already we can see Beckett smashing seriality and character to atoms.

It is wonderful to watch Beckett choke on his bile. His ‘savage indignation’ is stronger at times than Swift’s. On the death of a close friend who had suffered much pain, he spits out in exasperation: ‘Fucking fucking earth’ (no need to worry about the censor in such private circumstances); he thinks Dylan Thomas’s poems are ‘fat’ and ‘hyperarticulated’, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception nothing but ‘Flannel Bags’, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Mrs Chatterley’s Lover’ (a deliberate misconstruing of the title) ‘a singularly unexciting work’ (the inference being, ‘Why would the censor worry about that sentimental trash?’). Reading E. M. Forster is like ‘swallowing fine sand’. We have glimpses of his family (‘Jim has lost a leg … dead’), his liking for alcohol (‘la dive bouteille’), his hypochondria (‘Mild migraines and semi-blindness. I continue none the less’), his comic gambits with correspondents (‘Dear Mr. Clodd, Thank you for your letter’), his renaming of countries (‘Titonia’ for Yugoslavia, ‘Haemmordilia’ for the Emerald Isle), his responses to academics (‘No, I have not read Wittgenstein’, ‘I don’t know Moses and Aron’), his liking for discovering innocent howlers in his reading (as this gem from The Mill on the Floss, for instance: ‘Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness’). Humour, let’s face it, is what academics have often refused to see in Beckett’s work.

His intellectual background is clear enough from the Letters. He quotes the old Greek philosopher Gorgias’s syllogism:

1. Nothing is
2. If anything is, it cannot be known
3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in words.

Get out of that bind if you like! He tells us what he learned from Proust: ‘There is nothing more exciting for the writer, or richer in unexplored possibility than the failure to express’. And he tell us he loves gardening. In Volume II of the Letters we found him growing beetroot. Here we find him sowing parsley and marigolds ‘which have not come up’. ‘What’s sad?’ he asks. ‘Still cold grey sporadic snow. Nothing to read. A German treatise on suicide. Statistics. Unexciting. Uninformative. Unhelpful’. The poetry of the prose is such as we might find in any of his novels. Here the private and public personae coalesce. In the end reading these two books (and there won’t be any better published this year) one has an awareness that beneath the sensitivity Samuel Beckett (like his old reliable Citroën 2CV) was ‘increvable’ – tough as old boots.