Beckett’s and Hemingway’s Letters

Interesting dual review of their letters, which have been published as separate volumes by the Cambridge University Press. The Beckett is the second volume, the Hemingway is the first.

Young Hemingway sounds like an unbearable correspondent:

It is likewise difficult to find evidence in these letters of the literary understatement for which Hemingway was to become famous. His favored style as a very young man is in fact an elaborate facetiousness, the sort of thing that turns a simple concept like “the last two days” into “the last brace of diurnals.” This is most particularly true of the letters sent to male friends, so that male camaraderie is not a matter of simple grunts and groans but of obscure periphrasis, as if it had to protect itself from something. But this is also the style that Hemingway resorts to in writing to his sisters and to the various high school girls he palled around with in his early twenties. Frosted with an extra layer of baby talk, it is the excruciating manner of the early letters to Hadley Richardson, his first wife. In other words, as a letter-writer, Hemingway hides deep emotion with a smokescreen of overstatement, a technique that is exactly the opposite of the one he was to use as a novelist.

Whereas Becket sounds like Beckett:

The letters written from Ussy often sound as if they had been plucked from abandoned drafts of Molloy: “Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude, brightened up by gardening and walks, shorter and shorter, I feel this evening that that would suit me, and suit me the least badly possible.” The stage props of his life there are as spare as those of the plays, and yet they also yield a disproportionate pathos: “I have bought a wheelbarrow, my first wheelbarrow! It goes very well, with its one wheel.” The rhythm and the sound of these sentences, the way they chip away at their already minimal certainties with clause after clause of sad qualification, is so reminiscent of the novels and plays that it is a shock to remember that in the case of literature and letters the words familiar to English-speaking readers are not the original ones at all. Most of the letters, like almost all the works after Watt, were written in French. After Molloy, Beckett wrenched the works into English himself, and sometimes into German as well. Even in such a simple case as that of the wheelbarrow, something is lost in the process of translation, where the French provides a humorous echo from the verb to the noun: “Elle roule bien, avec sa seule roue.” For this little effect, the translator has chosen a fairly good substitute, near-rhyming “well” and “wheel.” In the course of making dozens and dozens of such decisions, George Craig has done a remarkable job of making the English of these translations sound like the English into which Beckett translated himself.

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