Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
We get Dwight Garner to write about Beckett's letters, and the British get . . . Gabriel Josipovici. That's not fair.
Luckily, we have the Internet to bridge the trans-Atlantic gap. The TLS:
And though many of these letters have been in the public domain for years (some of the letters to Tom McGreevy, for example, already quoted by Deirdre Bair in her Samuel Beckett of 1978), the effect of reading them all together is completely different from reading extracts embedded in a biography. For biography, no matter how tactfully it is written, has the effect Sartre described years ago, of imposing a false teleology on its subject, of giving a shape and meaning to the life which it did not have for the one who was living it. Letters, on the other hand, are so moving because we live each moment with their author and time takes on the dimension it has in our own lives: of being more like a well into which we are perpetually falling at a deceptively slow pace than like a well-lit road along which we travel, our destination clearly visible ahead.
The quotes from the letters themselves in this review are just incredible. Here's Beckett rejecting a rejection:
My dear McGreevy, The abominable old bap Russell duly returned my MSS with an economic note in the 3rd person, the whole in a considerably understamped envelope. I feel slightly paralysed by the courtesy of this gesture. I would like to get rid of the damn thing anyhow, anywhere (with the notable exception of “transition”), but I have no acquaintance with the less squeamish literary garbage buckets. I can’t imagine Eliot touching it – certainly not the verse. Perhaps Seumas O’Sullivan’s rag would take it? If you think of an address I would be grateful to know it.
And I'll let you guess which author Beckett is referring to here:
His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore’s, but no less profuse, a maudlin false-teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. He drank too much tilleul. And to think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!
Now to buy a copy of this book . . .
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Proust, clearly! “Tilleul” is lindenflower tea, exactly what he dipped the famous madeleine into. Connolly also thought Proust a great writer, but one whose spirit was often not equal to his own tremendous resources of language.