THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT:

VOLUME ONE: 1929 -- 1940

Edited by Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck

Cambridge University Press, £30

It is nearly a quarter of a century since Beckett first intimated that an edition of his letters might be published after his death -- he died in 1989. He stipulated that only those letters "having bearing on my work" should be included. A most literal interpretation of that stipulation was insisted upon by the first literary executor of the Beckett estate and that insistence hamstrung the projected publication for some years.

Beckett's nephew -- the current literary executor -- evidently subscribes to a more liberal and looser interpretation of the stipulation and so this volume (the first of four) now sees the light of day.

In their "general introduction" the editors say they located and transcribed some 15,000 letters from Beckett, written over a period of 60 years, to various correspondents.

An edited selection of some 2,500 letters and cross references to another 5,000 will appear in the four volumes so that, all in all, about half of Beckett's voluminous correspondence will achieve at least partial publication. Beckett may well be the last major author whose letters will achieve the monumentality of published volumes -- there will hardly be a market for a collection of e-mails, faxes and text messages from any contemporary author you might care to mention.

There is a lovely irony implicit in the first letter in the book -- written to Joyce in Paris from Beckett in Kassel, Germany -- to the effect that young Beckett (he was nearly a month shy of his 24th birthday) has succeeded in improving a passage in his critical essay on Joyce's Work in Progress (aka Finnegans Wake). This from a writer who in his most celebrated play has one of his characters insult another by calling him a "Critic!".

Young Beckett did not then know what he wanted to do or to be but he did at least know that when he arrived in Paris in late 1928 he wanted to meet Joyce. He had even secured a letter of introduction to the great man from a relative by marriage -- to be precise, from his father's sister's husband's brother -- which proved to be surplus to requirements because within days of arriving in France he was brought to meet Joyce by that extraordinary Kerryman, Thomas McGreevy.

In fact the bulk of the letters in this first volume are those from Beckett to McGreevy. Through the generosity of McGreevy's family these letters -- many in appalling handwriting and occasionally almost illegible typescript -- have been available to scholars at the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

It is to the inestimable credit of the editors of this book that fully readable and copiously annotated versions of the letters are presented here -- they are, quite literally, a sight for sore eyes. But way beyond the comfort of scholars what these letters reveal and dramatise is that the writing of them provided Beckett with opportunities to compose, to confront the blank page and make marks that, however inefficiently, communicate to a reader.

McGreevy, to his eternal credit, was the addressee of news and gossip, jokes and macaronic, multilingual puns, complaints and aesthetic speculations and some of the most acute and sophisticated art criticism one is likely to encounter. Right through the 1930s Beckett was a writer with "an itch to make" but with no idea what it was he wanted to make.

He poured into his letters -- and not only to McGreevy -- all the intellectual and literary creativity that could find no other outlet.

The Beckett estate and the editors of these letters are spot on in regarding them as "bearing upon [the] work".

For most of the years covered by this volume, the letters constitute a fair proportion of the "work" itself, they are hugely welcome additions to the canon of Beckett's incomparable writing and the knowledge that there are three more volumes to come is a promise of riches in impoverished times.

There are absences (perhaps "suppressions" might be a better word) to be regretted too. In the mid-1930s Beckett took a trip to Nazi Germany to visit public museums of approved art and private collections of work officially described as "degenerate".

One of his correspondents was his Dublin friend Mary Manning whom he kept informed as to the progress of his tour, the latest rejections of his novel Murphy and the inexorable development of a boil he had "between wind and water".

The grotesque, disgusting but hilarious and human comedy that Beckett wrested from his pain and suffering in Berlin -- not included in this selection of letters -- predicts with pinpoint accuracy the trajectory of the astonishing and glorious work to come.

Gerry Dukes has edited Beckett's postwar novellas and produced an illustrated biography of the writer See Theatre column, page 23

- Gerry Dukes