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.