Yours Ever, Sam
By DWIGHT GARNER writing in the New York Times, March 5, 2009

It would hardly seem possible were the evidence not right here: Samuel Beckett, that most taciturn and private of 20th-century writers — the man who said “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” — was in fact one of the century’s great correspondents.

Liam Costello
Samuel Beckett in an undated photograph.

THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Volume 1, 1929-1940
Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
Illustrated. 782 pages. Cambridge University Press. US$50

More than 15,000 of Beckett’s letters have been discovered in archives and private collections, and Cambridge University Press plans to issue a selection of them in four jumbo-size volumes, the first of which has now arrived. At nearly 800 pages, Volume 1, weighed down with scholarly apparatus, makes a mighty thunk on the coffee table. But reading it is far from homework: the Beckett we meet in these piquant letters, most written when he was in his late 20s and early 30s, is rude, mordantly witty and scatological yet often (and this is perhaps the biggest surprise) affectionate and wholehearted.

The letters were posted from many cities, including Paris, Dublin, London and Dresden, as Beckett (1906-89) traveled for teaching jobs, for pleasure and for room to clear his head and write. He was often alone and lonely, but he had many friends, including James Joyce; the heiresses Nancy Cunard and Peggy Guggenheim; and the painter Jack Butler Yeats, the brother of William Butler Yeats.

Letters made Beckett feel in touch with the larger world. He answered “in polite and timely fashion practically every letter that was addressed to him,” the editors write. His tended to close with “Yours ever” or “Beautiful Greetings” or “God love thee.” Then, simply, “Sam.”

Read the complete NYT piece here.