STILL LESS REVELATIONSThe Letters of Samuel Beckett, IV: 1966-1989. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck

In the summer of 1967 Samuel Beckett was in Berlin, directing his play Endspiel at the Schiller Theater. ‘Up to the neck in technical muck’, he seemed to be having an abnormally good time. The work has made a great leap last 4 or 5 days. They’re running already and the souffleuse [prompter] is out of work. I had the (for me) bright idea of having them rehearse without me. The thing was sufficiently laid down for there to be little danger. They like that and it has done them good. Shall let them have another run alone before the opening. (to Barbara Bray, 13 September) This is both chirpy and self-aware; Beckett could be so inflexible that twelve years later, when directing Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days, his constant moans at hearing her say ‘Ah well’ and not ‘Oh well’ would see him cast out of his own rehearsals. In Berlin, however, his mood was upbeat, because the ‘technical muck’ had his undivided attention, and in the years spanned by this fourth and final volume of Letters – 1966 to his death in 1989 – his space was rarely his own. In Paris he seemed permanently under siege, whether by friends old and new, or wannabes creative and critical. As George Craig puts it, in his superb ‘Translator’s Preface’, ‘by now everyone (that familiar socio-literary entity) knows Samuel Beckett’. But for a month in 1967 at least, Beckett slipped away from everyone into a little place of quiet, and we read a series of letters to Barbara Bray in London that record him enjoying its pleasures. ‘Lunch alone, dinner alone, walks alone’ (26 August); ‘Walked about 7 miles in the parks and worked a lot on [the French translation of] Watt’ (4 September); ‘Great strolls in the Bellevue park’ (25 September). Some evenings he dines with friends at an unassuming restaurant on the Klopstockstraße, though he’s happy enough to be home alone with ‘whiskey, Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial, apples’ (17 August). At one point, he complains that he can find only scotch: ‘Had to work the whisky (no e, alas) pretty hard’ (to Avigdor Arikha and Anne Atik, 29 August). An Irishman to the last.

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