Beckett is sometimes characterised as a nihilist, but this is not quite the case. Though his writing rejects false hope, rejects any kind of theological frogwash that might justify the purposeless fact of human suffering, its systematic negation gestures toward the recognition of a fundamental reality. He negates in order to arrive at a truth, however discomfiting that truth might turn out to be. By kicking away the scaffolding of narrative, depriving his characters of all but the most limited forms of movement or interaction – depicting them alone, ignorant, tied to chairs, buried up to their necks, crawling blindly through mud and darkness – he deprives them of material agency in a way that emphasises the priority and the unaccountable strangeness, not merely of existence, but of conscious existence.

Some of the distinctive tone of Beckett’s prose derives from the odd impression that his protagonists are talking endlessly and compulsively to themselves, but can’t understand where the voices are coming from. They are at the mercy of sudden attacks of mental incontinence. Memories surface, contextless and unexpected, welling up from some unknowable place like bubbles in volcanic mud. Their conspicuously fallible minds are aware of the sufferings of their prostrated, constrained, decaying bodies to a sometimes finical degree, but the connection between their squalid material existence and their apprehension remains mysterious.

Much of the humour in Beckett derives from the ways in which his characters negotiate their essential limitations, ordering their meagre possessions, developing routines that are coherent but serve no purpose beyond their own internal harmony: Molloy’s complex arrangement for keeping track of his sucking stones, for example; or the balanced, rhythmically precise persiflage between Vladimir and Estragon. Stories and plays are themselves instances of this kind of self-contained process. This is the implication picked up by Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), his witty collision of Waiting for Godot and Hamlet: possessing an awareness that something is taking its course, without knowing how or why, is akin to being trapped inside a play. For Beckett, narratives ultimately collapse under the weight of their own futility, like the (very funny) stories Malone tells himself in Malone Dies (1951); or else lapse into silence in recognition of the fact that they signify nothing but themselves. In this way, it is implied that the very idea that existence might possess something so crass as a ‘meaning’ is misplaced, if not nonsensical. Existence cannot be meaningful, because it is the one thing we can never be outside. The only option is to go on, to muddle through the whole painfully ridiculous process. As Hamm observes in Endgame (1958): ‘you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’

Part of the reason why attempts to gloss Beckett’s writings tend to be inadequate and contentious is because his work implies, paradoxically, that signification is itself the problem. His work draws us into a process that invites recognition but backs away from explanation. ‘We’re not beginning to ... to ... mean something?’ wonders Hamm. ‘Mean something!’ laughs Clov. ‘You and I mean something! Ah that’s a good one!’ It is significant on this point that Beckett was reluctant to speak publicly about the implications of his work. He downplayed the appearance of a certain contentious monosyllable in the title of his best-known play, and resisted the idea that the audience should look for any allegorical or symbolic significance beyond the immediate surface. Notoriously exacting about the presentation of his dramatic works, he believed actors should do as they were told and not try to interpret his lines, which he insisted be taken literally. When an actor asked him how to say, ‘If I knew the combination of the safe, I’d kill you’, he replied: ‘Just think that if you knew the combination of the safe, you would kill him.’

The publication of Beckett’s letters is naturally of great interest and literary significance; that he proves to be a dedicated and forthcoming correspondent makes it something of an event. Some of his letters are already public: an exchange between Beckett and the American theatre director Alan Schneider was published in 1998, and his three biographers – Deirdre Bair (1990), Anthony Cronin (1999) and James Knowlson (2004) – all draw on his correspondence. But this barely scratches the surface. The editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, claim to have transcribed 15,000 letters, which would be impressive even without the opinion of the manuscript expert who informed them that Beckett had ‘the worst handwriting of any twentieth-century author’. They propose to publish 2,500 of them across four volumes, incorporating citations from 5,000 more.

The first volume reflects the enormous scholarly effort that has gone into the project. It is indexed, cross-referenced and footnoted with a thoroughness that borders on the overweening. The letters Beckett wrote in French and German are reproduced in the original and in translation. Contextualising biographical information is provided where necessary, including a chronological record of Beckett’s movements, year by year, and a profile of each correspondent is provided in an appendix. The acknowledgments alone fill thirteen pages, in small print.

As the editors explain in the introduction, their access was not without conditions. Beckett left instructions that they could publish ‘those passages only having bearing on my work’. This marvellously imprecise formula evidently became a source of conflict. The editors state that ‘it is [their] view that Beckett’s frequent, at times almost obsessive, discussion of his health problems – his feet, his heart palpitations, his boils and cysts – is of direct relevance to his work; with this The Estate of Samuel Beckett has disagreed’.

The clipped tone makes its point, but the volume as it stands does not want for illuminating material. The formative years it covers, extending from Beckett’s early twenties to his mid-thirties, are not his most productive, but his letters provide a fascinating portrait of a young man discovering the aesthetic and philosophical direction of his future work. They are filled with his thoughts on the books, music and art he encounters, which he elaborates with what can sometimes seem like uncharacteristic enthusiasm, his judgement veering toward absolutes in a youthfully cavalier fashion. The self-confidence is tempered with a self-indulgent gloom that reveals a more recognisably Beckettian sense of the absurd: ‘a few moments of consideration equipoised so perfectly the pros & cons that as usual I found myself constrained to do nothing.’

Evident, too, is a degree of uncertainty about his future. Beckett had yet to settle permanently in France. Though he longed to escape life in Ireland, which inspired in him a ‘tired abstract anger – inarticulate passive opposition’, he was still psychologically tethered there by his redoubtable mother, May. He spent substantial stretches of time in London, where he underwent psychoanalysis, and in Germany, where his primary occupation was visiting art galleries. The manuscript of what became his first published novel, Murphy (1938), was in the process of being rejected by numerous publishing houses during this time, and a dispiriting series of dealings and gripes run throughout the collection. Despite having published a well-received monograph on Proust (1931), a collection of stories, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and a book of poems, Echo’s Bones (1935), Beckett’s future as a writer was not necessarily assured. He had endured a brief, disastrous stint as a teacher in Belfast (Bair tells the story, which I cannot resist repeating, that the principal told Beckett his students were ‘the cream of Ulster’; ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘all rich and thick’), and he knew he did not want to become a professor, yet still he was prompted, in 1937, to apply for an academic position in Cape Town. In one letter, he half-heartedly considers finding a job in an advertising agency. Even more tantalisingly, the volume preserves a letter to Sergei Eisenstein, in which Beckett proposes to travel to Moscow and study film with the great Russian director.

But throughout this sometimes unhappy period, the letters reveal a young writer drawn to works that speak to his strong sense of detachment and isolation. It comes as no surprise to read Beckett writing admiringly of Arthur Schopenhauer, or discovering a kindred spirit in Goncharov’s famous anti-hero, whom he transforms into an honorary Irishman with an apostrophe, ‘O’Blomov’. But there are moments of insight in less expected places. His friend, the painter Jack Butler Yeats, is commended in almost identical terms in separate letters for depicting two people in a way that captures the absoluteness of their solitude. Cézanne, too (in an assessment that reveals more about Beckett’s artistic disposition than Cézanne’s), earns praise for depicting an ‘atomistic landscape with no vellities of vitalism’, for finding a way to represent the world as ‘material of a particular order, incommensurable with all human expression’.

Beckett was preoccupied for several years during this period with researching a work, titled Human Wishes, about Samuel Johnson’s friendship with Hester Thrale. The play, which he never finished, was to be based around the peculiar sexual tension and psychological dependency of their relationship, but Beckett was also drawn to the intensity of Johnson’s spiritual torment: ‘there can hardly have been many so completely at sea in their solitude as he was’, he observes of Johnson, ‘or so horrifiedly aware of it’. Of particular fascination is the fact that Johnson’s fear of death was more terrible to him than the agony of life, such that he was moved to declare an eternity of torment to be preferable to annihilation.

Beckett served a famous literary apprenticeship with James Joyce, which, in a sense, frames the period under consideration, though their correspondence is not extensive. His friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy – the most frequent recipient of the volume’s letters – introduced them in 1928, when Beckett came to Paris to take up a position at the École Normale. The young Beckett became one of the many admirers and hangers-on that Joyce put to work, running errands, chasing up references and taking dictation for the work that would eventually become Finnegans Wake (1939). The first two letters reproduced here are brief notes to Joyce: one concerning an essay Beckett contributed to a volume about Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’; the other providing a quotation in Greek from an unidentified source. There was a falling out for a period, after Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, developed an unrequited romantic fixation with Beckett, but they were reconciled in the late 1930s, several years before Joyce’s death in 1941.

The irresistible thought of two of the twentieth century’s greatest writers in collaboration has meant that a great deal has been written about this relationship. Beckett always acknowledged his debt to Joyce – whom he refers to throughout as ‘Shem’ or ‘the Penman’ (after Joyce’s shambolic alter ego in Finnegans Wake), in a way that conveys a mixture of affection and ironic distance – but he insisted it was Joyce’s example, rather than his influence, that mattered to him. This is borne out by the letters.

By his own admission, some of Beckett’s early work displayed Joyce’s influence, and the two writers share a vaguely obsessive scatology and a liking for broad comedy and obscene puns, some of which is evident in Beckett’s correspondence: the publishing house Chatto & Windus is derided as ‘Shaton & Windup’; an Aldous Huxley novel is indelibly spoonerised into ‘Cunt Pointercunt’. ‘T. Eliot’, he cannot help reminding McGreevy, is ‘toilet’ backwards. But, temperamentally and philosophically, the pair is mismatched. Joyce’s response to modernism’s loss of faith in old forms of representation was to turn towards encyclopedic inclusiveness, humane affirmation and playful aestheticism. For Beckett, language itself had become the problem. If his writing often seems closer in spirit to that of Gertrude Stein – whose prose is hair-raising because, as you read, you can almost feel the words being peeled away from their denotative meaning – it is because it is. In a letter written in German to the editor and translator Axel Kaun in 1937, more than a decade before he made the momentous decision to begin writing in French, Beckett observed:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying beneath it. Grammar and style! To me they have become as irrelevant as a Beidermeier bathing suit or the imperterbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come ... when language is best used when it is most efficiently abused ... To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

‘In my opinion,’ he writes, ‘the most recent work of Joyce had nothing at all to do with such a programme [...] Perhaps Gertrude Stein’s Logographs come closer to what I mean.’ This remarkable letter, which goes on to express a desire to dissolve the ‘terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface’, to find a way out of ‘the forest of symbols that are no symbols’, eventually to get at ‘the silence underlying all’, broadly sets out the direction of Beckett’s future work.

We should be careful about taking Beckett’s scorn for grammar and style too literally. The letter displays some of the self-importance, overstatement and condescension that characterises manifestos. ‘The unhappy lady (is she still alive?),’ he writes of Stein (she was), ‘is undoubtedly still in love with her vehicle.’ His later decision to write in a second language was a way of finding a kind of styleless style, a blank or affectless quality, a new asceticism. But Beckett always wrote with great precision. A late prose work such as Company (1979) might even be seen to possess a quality that one could almost be tempted to describe as beauty. When he comes closest to a Stein-like pulverising of grammar, when he seems most out of love with his vehicle, his work is at its least agreeable. How It Is (1961) is not much fun at all. It is the paradoxical, poised quality – the distinctive combination of humour and scrupulousness – that gives Beckett’s best work its peculiar appeal.

The forthcoming volumes promise to be very interesting indeed.