Writing is a reflex of absence, an attempt to make contact with a distant, elusive reader. No one understood the tenuousness of the undertaking better than Samuel Beckett, whose hero in Malone Dies writes himself to death, and after sharpening his pencil at both ends is gratified to see that “my lead is not inexhaustible.” But despite his skepticism about what he called “the making relation,” Beckett was a loyal friend and a tireless letter writer.
Dublin with its dripping weather and teetotal Sundays depressed him, so he spent much of the 1930s in London, Paris, Hamburg and Berlin; as he wandered, letters kept him tethered to indispensable friends like the art historian Thomas McGreevy, his principal correspondent in these early years. Every message to McGreevy concludes with a plea for reciprocation: “Write soon” or: “Keep me in the current” or: “Hurry up back.”
Beckett left 15,000 letters and his American editors seem determined to cram most of them, along with their own prattlingly pedantic commentary, into four bulbous volumes. This first installment records the young man’s fumbling efforts to make his way in the world. His shoe explodes on the Boul’ Mich in Paris, reducing him to a Chaplinesque tramp; he pleads for review copies from snooty London literary editors and is wittily resilient when publishers reject More Pricks Than Kicks or Murphy. In one lodging house, he is tormented by neighbors with a raucous wireless and with saintly forbearance says: “I must put up with it.”
His first letter is addressed to his mentor, James Joyce, whom he served as a translator, researcher and general factotum throughout the decade. An aside reports on “the usual drama” with Joyce, and he might be obliquely reflecting on his own submissiveness when he sneers at admirers who “would feel honored if Joyce signed a piece of his used toilet paper.” The services rendered are not entirely selfless, since Beckett hopes to give his own career a “kick in the arse” by writing a homage to Finnegans Wake for a French magazine. Joyce’s death in 1941 will surely be the traumatic event that starts the second volume.
When Beckett’s father dies in 1933, speech is stifled. “I can’t write about him,” he touchingly tells McGreevy. “I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.” The death of his literary parent may turn out to have a different effect; only after being freed from Joyce’s intimidating influence could Beckett find his own voice.
Writing from Dublin to McGreevy in France, he quotes Stephen Dedalus’s recommendation of “silence, exile and cunning” as the tactics that help a young artist to survive. The mantra needs modifying in Beckett’s case: his preference was for expulsion rather than exile, and he repeatedly describes his writing as the evacuation of bodily waste. Poems are pustular or else they explode from within him like spermatic missiles. When a journal accepts a few of these “turds from my central lavatory,” he celebrates by turning the church’s wrathful “dies irae” into a fluent, gushing “dies diarrhoeae.”
Exiled from Ireland and from his native language, Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in a punning, polyglot idiom of his own invention. Beckett has his own equivalent to this composite babble. As he travels, he is constantly translating, aware that any word is a dubious, untrustworthy translation of a feeling. The “sensation of taking root” disgusts him and makes him think of a malignant polyp. He gets through the ordeal of Christmas and New Year in Ireland by giving the occasions their French and German names, Noel and Silvester. A letter written in German declares that it is “difficult, even pointless for me to write in formal English” and hopes for a futuristic “literature of the non-word.”
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