As he sometimes did, Beckett had come to London to join his London publisher John Calder for the start of the cricket season. Strolling down to Lord’s on a bright spring day, the pair were not exactly deep in animated conversation. Calder, noting the weather, the prospect of a full day’s play, and, presumably, the odd bird singing, commented to Beckett: ‘Well, Sam: just the sort of day that makes you glad to be alive, isn’t it?’ Which prompted the quintessentially Beckettian response: ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far.’

This combination of ‘yes, but …’ or ‘no, but …’, or, in its more familiar versions, ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ / ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ is characteristic not only of Beckett’s creative work but also, and repeatedly, of the grappling with language, silence, meaning, presence, and absence that runs through this second volume of his letters. And while many focus on specific philosophical and aesthetic issues, on the understanding of the problematic relationship between ‘reality’ and its ‘(non)-representation’, or on issues of publishing, typesetting, contracts, and licenses, many others can, in the space of half a dozen sentences, cover topics as varied as – for example, in a letter to Mania Péron from March 1952 – translating Baudelaire, problems in finding a theatre for Waiting for Godot, attending to proofs, the weather, and such local news as ‘the farm-workers are fucking the cows, perched on 3-legged milking stools. Bad for the cows, it seems.’ (Note the precise detail of the stools.)

In a later letter from March 1956 to Robert Pinget, younger than Beckett by thirteen years, he can disarmingly write ‘I have no advice to give you, having blundered all my life’; move on to speak of working in ‘little autumnal bursts’; lament a cold spell that killed off his cedar; weep over some mimosas; mention a ‘wonderful performance of Winterreise by Fischer-Dieskau’; describe planting trees (thirty) and digging holes (fifteen); confess that he had seen a bit of theatre (so much for protestations elsewhere that he doesn’t go to the theatre); indicate that he is thinking of going to London in June for the Lord’s Test; suggest Pinget visit Kew Gardens; and end up with a typically Beckettian piece of advice: ‘Don’t lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing that to us.’ (While the English translation offers ‘sing it for us’, Beckett’s French is more forceful – ‘chantez-nous ça’.)

Of course, not every letter covers such a range of topics and registers: but many present the reader with a Beckett who is anything but monosyllabic (even while professing that he is), or restricted to purely literary or artistic topics, though these are rarely absent from the conversation. And for the reader (or researcher) interested in tracing Beckett’s intellectual development and teasing out the complexities of his engagement with questions related to his own work and that of others, the extended exchanges (over the years 1947–53) with Georges Duthuit offer more than sufficient material – often, through no fault of the translators, as impenetrable in English as in the original French. As Dan Gunn notes in his masterly and lucid Introduction: ‘In the rhythm of approach and withdrawal […] confident prediction and radical uncertainty […] the need to express and the commitment to a non-expressive art […] the letters […] find their tortuous paths.’

As we follow Beckett writing to correspondents of the difficulties with Godot or the great quartet of novels (Murphy, Molloy, The Unnameable, and Malone Dies), of the often protracted and repetitive dealings regarding contracts and translations with his French and American publishers and agents, we come to experience the equivalent of ‘the sense of dramatic irony’ noted by the American critic Michael Gorra apropos the reading of Henry James’s letters. For, while we share the author’s anxieties, frustrations, and struggles to get works acknowledged, staged, or published, we are also aware that these, to him, immediate and pressing problems will actually come to assume not major but transient importance over the next ten years as Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, along with their author, come to be seen as landmarks of twentieth-century theatre.

It is from this dialectic, along with the categories singled out by Gunn above, that the letters derive their impetus and fascination. But, aside from the more general insights into Beckett’s creative process, there are wonderful letters and passages in letters addressing an array of more specific topics, and offering asides on individual writers and works. We learn from the same letter (1 June 1949) to Duthuit, in which Beckett urges him to ‘keep on sending me your aesthetic, or rather spiritual exercises’, that he is translating a piece for French Reader’s Digest – ‘a very noble and statistical piece about the awfulness of gambling machines’ – and that not only does he regard Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days as alerte, but he even takes the time to spell out the menu for Phileas Fogg’s lunch at the Reform Club (although, as the ever-vigilant footnotes point out, the main course was not ‘roast beef stuffed with stalks of rhubarb and gooseberries’, but ‘roast beef accompanied by “mushroom” condiments, followed by a gâteau stuffed with rhubarb and gooseberries’).

It is one of the outstanding merits of this edition that the research that has gone into the footnotes is both exhaustive and informative, and, in itself, a major contribution to Beckett scholarship. Obscure publications or figures are identified (even down to a fourth-placed skier from a Chamonix event in 1951), and when Beckett mentions in an aside that he is ‘opposed to [Nicholas] de Staël’s ideas for the set’ (for Godot), the editors provide a detailed paragraph in which they establish a context that enables the reader to understand a possible basis for Beckett’s objections. Esoteric quotes from authors as different as Farquhar and Galsworthy are tracked down; and after a mention by Beckett of ‘the panegyric of the poet whose name sincerely I can’t recall’, one can only guess at the love’s labour’s lost that preceded the bald note ‘the panegyric to which SB refers has not been found’. There may be other oversights, but in 886 pages the only glaring error encountered was the listing of the actor Peter Bull’s dates as 1912–55. This comes as a surprise to those of us who can recall his crucial cameos in films such as Tom Jones (1963), Dr Strangelove (1964), and The Tempest (1979): the correct death date is 1984.

If I were to single out one section of this volume for any budding actors or directors, it would be Beckett’s own comments on the staging of his work, with particular reference to Waiting for Godot. (Similarly, I look forward, on the basis of those observations, to what he might have to say in future volumes on works such as Endgame and Happy Days, or the haunting monologues Footfalls and Not I.) What is so engaging about Beckett’s numerous asides (Estragon’s trousers have to ‘fall right down […] not half-way’), as well as the detailed production notes, is just how precise and theatrically suggestive his comments are. By now the tales of using a metronome in rehearsal to set both speech and performance rhythms are well known. But the Beckett of these letters is a writer not just obsessed with vocal precision, but also focused on precisely those production details that separate generalised presentation from the specific qualities of an individual scene or exchange between characters.

While he can write in January 1952 that ‘I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively’, he also knows very well what he wants done with it. The four pages of notes to Peter Hall, after seeing his original London production, should be required reading for any director. In them Beckett covers everything from the lighting needed to suggest the arc of the rising moon, through slight (though crucial) textual variants, precise instructions on gestures and attitudes (‘Lucky dances for Pozzo, who should not turn his back, but manifest his disgust’), repeated insistence on ‘giving full value to silences’, to the wonderful specificity of sketching in a stick figure to illustrate the pose required for the line ‘Let’s just do the tree.’

What Alan Schneider calls the ‘theatrical wisdom’ and ‘great clarity’ of these acting notes makes me regret even more my own missed opportunity for a ‘Beckett story’. Back in 1964, after organising tickets for the Royal Court revival of Waiting for Godot, due to open in two weeks, I went into the pub next door to the theatre for a lunchtime drink. Seated at a table in the far corner, away from the bar, were George Devine and Beckett, not in silence, but, for Beckett, seemingly quite animated conversation. I couldn’t summon up either the furtiveness or youthful cheek to slide into a vacant chair at the table next to them, so simply sat for forty-five minutes, sneaking the occasional glance in their direction, until they left, presumably to go back to rehearsals. Imagination dead imagine