Trinity College Library Dublin has just purchased the most extensive collection of Samuel Beckett letters (347 in number) ever to have been offered for public sale. It now holds the largest collection of Beckett letters of any research library in the world, a fitting home for the correspondence of one of the college’s most famous alumni.
These letters and cards were sent from the Nobel-prizewinning author to artists Henri and Josette Hayden. Beckett and his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, met the Haydens when both couples were in southern France evading discovery by the Nazis during the second World War. The letters in this collection begin in 1947 and cover the difficult period in Beckett’s life during which his mother and brother Frank died. They also cover the most intensely fertile period of his writing life when he was completing Waiting for Godot, and working on his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. There is much for the biographer in this new cache but even more for the student of Beckett’s literary work.
This latest acquisition cements Trinity College Library’s position as the world’s number one repository for the correspondence of Samuel Beckett. Key among the other collections in Trinity are the letters Beckett sent to his friend, the poet Thomas MacGreevy, and those he sent to translator and literary critic Barbara Bray. In the MacGreevy collection Beckett wrote in a most personal manner; in the Bray collection he wrote principally about his work. The Hayden collection links these two correspondences both by overlapping chronologically and also in being a combination of the personal and the literary. Thus they allow scholars to see the different ways in which Beckett expressed himself to different people; they cover the time when Beckett made his final break from Ireland after his mother’s death, and also the period of his first significant literary success.
When the recent volume of Beckett’s published letters by Cambridge University Press appeared, the editors noted with some regret that while they had built up a “substantial corpus” of his correspondence, it was by no means complete, adding that: “By far the most important collection to which the editors have not had access is constituted by the more than 300 letters addressed to Josette and Henri Hayden,” which, they noted, were in private hands.
The generosity of William O’Sullivan, keeper of manuscripts in Trinity from the 1950s to 1982, who left a bequest to the library, made the acquisition possible. Beckett also presented some of his own literary manuscripts to Trinity’s Library in the 1960s; he gave some of his Nobel prize money to the Library; he also gave a year’s worth of royalties from the Broadway production of Krapp’s Last Tape to the Berkeley Library’s building fund in the 1950s.
This generosity characterised Beckett’s dealings with his friends. In the case of Henri Hayden, as these letters reveal, Beckett’s assistance ranged from buying paints for him to introducing the artist to the dealer Victor Waddington, thereby securing Hayden’s reputation in the art world. When Henri became ill in his eighties the practical nature of Beckett’s friendship became even more important: he sorted out the couple’s taxes and ensured their rent was paid.
Librarian and college archivist Helen Shenton said: “These Beckett letters are very significant for Beckett scholarship at Trinity College, as well as nationally and internationally. We have been developing collections of significant Irish creative writers, and these letters build on the existing Beckett collections the library already holds. We welcome the opportunity to be able to share these collections with students of Beckett and researchers across the globe. To mark its arrival, we have mounted a small exhibition in the Long Room for those who would like to view this precious correspondence. We intend to make it more widely accessible for scholars and for the general public in the future.”
The Hayden collection follows the acquisition this year of several drafts of Beckett’s work, Ohio Impromptu, from the Beckett scholar, Stanley E Gontarski. Also in this new acquisition is Gontarski’s correspondence with Beckett from 1972; a copy of Three Plays (1984) revised by Beckett; and the proofs of Gontarski’s critical edition of Endgame, heavily revised and annotated by himself, Beckett and Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson.
