Volume details Beckett's
Godot
“I THINK it is impossible to have health in Dublin of any kind,” the letter reads. Not a flattering picture of the capital but one which can perhaps be forgiven when the identity of the author is revealed as Samuel Beckett.
In the same letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, written in 1949, Beckett mentions somewhat nonchalantly that he has "finished a second play in two acts, En attendant Godot, and am now typing it out".
This mention of what was to become the play most synonymous with the Irish writer, Waiting for Godot,is in The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956, published yesterday.
George Craig of the University of Sussex, one of the book’s four editors, said at its core was a series of “huge letters written at top speed as if to catch every inflection of hope and fear” experienced by the author.
At a reception yesterday in Trinity College to mark the publication of the book, he said the period covered was “that in which Beckett, following the war years spent hiding in unoccupied France, takes the decision to write his imaginative works in French and in a spell of intense activity acts on it producing stories, novels and the play which will change him from an aspiring writer to a figure of international renown”.
The second in a four-part volume, it also includes letters which the writer penned in French, but which have been reproduced in English.
The event, hosted by the French department of Trinity College, was sponsored by The Irish Timesand the French embassy.
Also at the in attendance were another editor of the book Dan Gunn; Irish Timeseditor Kevin O'Sullivan; cultural attaché of the French Embassy Hadrien Laroche, and Dr Sarah Alyn Stacey of Trinity.
The book’s other editors are Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.