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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 by Samuel Beckett, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, George Craig and Dan Gunn (view source)
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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956
|sort= Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956
|buy=Maybe
|borrow=Yes
|pages=886
|publisher=Cambridge University Press
|date=September 2011
|isbn=978-0521867948
|website=|videocover=0521867940|amazonukaznuk=<amazonuk>0521867940</amazonuk>|amazonusaznus=<amazonus>0521867940</amazonus>
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Despite the title, Volume 2 really begins in 1945. During the war, Beckett was working with the French Resistance, and had to go into hiding. In order to keep the picture reasonably complete, there is a chronology of the war years, and the introduction includes a lettercard sent to James Joyce in February 1941, a pre-printed postcard presenting prefabricated phrases which the sender could strike out as appropriate. During the war only the mildest of family news could be sent through the mail, and even this was subject to censorship. Joyce never received the card, as he died the day after it was written.
The correspondence therefore starts in January 1945. Many of the letters were originally written in French, although Beckett George Craig later translated them into English with an eye to eventual publication - very far-sighted of him. These years cover the period of his major achievements, notably a series of novels and ''Waiting for Godot'', the play for which he is most remembered.
Ever the most reclusive of characters, he always shunned the limelight. A letter of 1951 from his lover and later wife Suzanne Dumesnil to his publisher says apologetically that he ''will not hear of being interviewed, either orally or in writing''. Like many another writer, he valued his privacy, happy to let his writing say everything he wanted to without the need to explain it. He declares himself incapable of writing even a brief piece for the Radio Times; ''my ideas about radio are not even quarter baked and to write about my own work is a thing I simply can't do.'' Much of his surplus energy was expended in liaising with publishers and producers, to ensure that his work was conveyed in the way he wished. There are flashes of occasional unworldliness, for example in a comment from a letter of January 1956 to theatre director Alan Schneider on the principle that success and failure on the public level never mattered much to him; ''in fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.''
For further reading on modern culture of the era, may we also recommend [[Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay]].
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