All work, many plays

‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains much krapping away to both no little and little or no avail. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ remarks Krapp in the play, ‘But I wouldn’t want them back.’

Well, here they are, like it not: 9,000 pages of letters whittled down to just under 800 pages of text by a quartet of editors — George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck — who have devoted the past goodness knows how many years to the task of putting together volumes 1 (1929–1940), 2 (1941–1956), 3 (1957–1965) and now 4 (1966–1989) of a lifetime’s correspondence that stands as a necessary complement to Beckett’s published work.