The Nation reviews the first two volumes of Beckett's correspondence
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| Vladimir (Barry McGovern) and Estragon (Johnny Murphy) in Beckett's Waiting for Godot |
Aaron Thier reviews the first two volumes of Samuel Beckett's
Letters in
The Nation: 'Cambridge University Press has now published two of a projected four volumes of Beckett’s letters, and these are certainly the most important. The first runs from 1929 through 1940, the second from 1941 through 1956, and together they cover the critical events of Beckett’s writing life: his flight from Ireland in 1937; his decision, at more or less the same time, to begin writing in French; and his turn from fiction to drama in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many of the letters have been available to scholars for years, so these volumes don’t add a great deal to what’s already known about Beckett’s philosophical and aesthetic vision. What they do reveal is the man himself, the real person, and this is a crucially important discovery, because the popular image of Beckett as a steel-haired ascetic with staring eyes—Beckett the great mind, the dissertation subject—tends to obscure the great humanity of his work.' [
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