Sir, – I read with great interest Prof Nicholas Grene's scholarly and insightful review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956(Weekend Review, September 24th). One detail invites comment. With reference to Beckett's switch to French, Prof Grene notes: "To a correspondent who asked about the motive behind the change, Beckett offered only one cryptic clue: 'the need to be ill-equipped' ('le besoin d'être mal armé')."
Beckett is playing here on the name of the leading French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), himself an English specialist and author of a highly technical and now outdated treatise on the English language. In cryptically suggesting that he felt “the need to be Mallarmé”, Beckett is being characteristically ironic and mischievous in response to a question, to which he always avoided giving a straight answer. None the less, and for all their obvious differences, Mallarmé’s quest for the ultimate purity of expression is perhaps not all that far from Beckett’s constant paring back, his quest for “less-ness”. – Yours, etc,