When I think of Samuel Beckett, I do not think of a torrid love life. His was more the French way—he cohabited with Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil for many years before he married her while enjoying other relationships. Writing was his great amour.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-1965 (Vol. 3)
Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge University Press)
At the same time, Beckett’s plays, it has always seemed to me, ultimately lack interest in female characters. They are rather striking in their asexuality (although they do count sexuality as a human need and a source of comic inspiration) and their universality. I’m not trying to suggest that Beckett was a misogynist or a prude. But his female characters, such as Winnie (in Happy Days) and Nell (in Endgame), seem nominally so, and his male characters sometimes have female attributes. Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot are essentially an old married couple, but they could be any gender, really.
I recalled those rich complications as I read Volume 3 of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-1965, an extraordinary collection of missives edited by four Beckett scholars. The first two volumes have been critically acclaimed, and this one is a breathtaking feat, providing new insight into Beckett’s personal life and working process.
Volume 3 in particular addresses the question of how much we need to know about writers’ romantic lives in our selfies-crazed age—and especially how much we need to know about the romantic life of the famously reticent Beckett. Does knowing more enrich our understanding of his work? The answer appears to be yes.
The volume covers nine years, beginning as Waiting for Godot became a worldwide phenomenon and ending as Beckett had largely abandoned full-length plays for fragments, and for radio and film. (Like many other 20th-century theater visionaries—Artaud and Grotowski, for example—he became disenchanted with the constrictions of the form.) During this time, he wrote Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days and also produced a number of other short pieces.
Volume 3 finds Beckett an international celebrity living in Paris, traveling to productions of his plays all over the world. But he turns down many invitations, too, corresponding with his friends and bemoaning his interior state—that he can never again be as lean and hungry as he feels he needs to be.
Among the most important biographical facts here are Beckett’s letters documenting his literary collaboration and relationship with Barbara Bray, a translator who began working at the BBC in the 1950s. (The editors struggle over how to describe her, arguing that words like “mistress” are too perfunctory for the woman who became a kind of second wife.)
Some details about Bray were known: She met Beckett in 1957, when the BBC commissioned his first radio play, All That Fall. She fell in love with him and moved to Paris to be closer in 1961, the same year that he married Déchevaux-Dumesnil.
But reading Beckett’s letters to Bray is different from reading an account of their liaison in a biography. Just as some critics did not call Beckett’s plays theater when they first appeared, so some readers may not regard Beckett’s letters to Bray as love letters. You do not learn any prurient details in them. Nor where they ate or whether he preferred coq au vin to boeuf en daube. The letters are a mix of affection, reticence, and reproach, a sort of endgame, really, in which Beckett seems to be constantly trying to escape the stock character of the attached man with a mistress.
Here is one from 1960: “You know what I’d give to know you happier or less unhappy, but I can’t escape from myself and my conditions any further than I do and have. I think you do understand that, but sometimes you write as if you didn’t.”
Bray’s letters to Beckett are not included, but the reader can intuit her pleading, asking for more than Beckett was able to give. I believe that Beckett loved both her and his wife. As Bray herself has written, Beckett had a horror of hurting anyone. But it is still difficult to avoid the impression that Beckett was ruthless—most of all in his dedication to his work, but also to those who supported his creative life.
That is not to say that Beckett was like Brecht, who famously bedded and exploited his female theatrical collaborators. Like his plays, Beckett’s letters to Bray are forever retreating. In one, written in 1961, he seems to suggest that she take another lover: “You know it grieves me to think of you lonely and abstinent. So if you want me to be less grieved try and be a little less of both.” Beckett’s romantic liaisons are as unsentimental as his plays.
Beyond Beckett’s correspondence with Bray, this volume provides a powerful record of the writer’s insistence that his work has nothing to do with his life. “I dislike the ventilation of private documents. These throw no light on my work,” he complained when Barney Rosset, the director of Grove Press, published extracts of some of his letters without his permission.
And yet for people who teach and love Beckett—and I count myself among them—this volume proves the opposite. It reminds us that Beckett’s life is in his plays, which are less abstract than many critics have observed. Play is essentially three heads in urns—a man, his wife, and his mistress—riffing on the torture an affair has caused. Knowing about the real affair allows the reader to think about the play in realistic terms, however stylized it is.
Equally fascinating is Beckett’s precision about how his plays should look. Here he is on a Warsaw production of Godot: “The tree is perfect (perhaps a few leaves too many in the second act!).”
Beckett is generous—he supports several of his friends financially. And he always answers scholars inquiring about his work, no matter how idiotic or crude their attempts to assign one meaning or another to his plays. He rarely disagrees in writing. More often he is the model of gratitude. He writes Adorno after his essay on Endgame appeared: “Thank you again, dear Professor Adorno, for your friendship and for your belief in my work.”
In the end, Beckett’s generosity to his friends frustrated me. I wanted to see more of it in his letters to Bray. Or maybe my imagination was the problem. I wanted there to be an ending in which Bray and Beckett got married and lived happily ever after. But that probably says more about me. After all, I often feel the same way about Beckett’s plays. I want Godot to come and Hamm and Clov to leave the room and Krapp to fall in love. Instead, Beckett gives me annihilating ambivalence. And that’s the point.
Rachel Shteir is a literary critic and the author, most recently, of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (Penguin, 2011).
