Beckett's letters, taken together, are the record of a long argument with the page — with the sentence, and then with the idea that a sentence is the right unit at all. Six thousand of them. Over forty years. What emerges when you read them chronologically is not a writer sharpening his craft but a writer losing faith in the craft and continuing nonetheless.
What draws me back is not the drafts themselves but the letters about the drafts, and above all the letters about letters about drafts — the third-degree correspondence in which Beckett apologises to a friend for the apology he sent on Tuesday, which itself apologised for the hasty note of Sunday, which, the reader learns across three weeks of letters, Beckett had intended to soften over a longer reply that he had not managed to compose because the novel he was working on in Paris would not let him go.
I. On the weight of a single sentence.
In the winter of 1951 Beckett spent the best part of three weeks on one sentence. We know this because in the third week he finally wrote to Thomas MacGreevy and described what he had been doing. The letter is sardonic — Beckett always is, about his own inability — but something in its detail makes the sentence visible. He describes taking it apart. He describes putting it back together. He describes putting it back together wrongly. He describes, eventually, abandoning it, because the version he could have lived with was the one that no longer belonged in the page it had been written for.
That sentence did not survive into the published work. I have checked. But what did survive — as far as I can tell, what survived across the whole of the subsequent thirty years — was the discipline that sentence taught him: that a great many sentences ought to be lost, and that the loss was not a failure but a prerequisite.
The sentence he kept was, in the end, the one that had survived the ones he cut.
The reverse letter is also worth reading. In 1964 — after he had won the Prix International — Beckett writes to Georges Duthuit and complains that the prize is not a prize for the work but for its appearance of finished-ness. He has, he says, been mistaken for a writer who arrives. Writers, he corrects, do not arrive. They lose, and what remains is the residue of the losing, and the residue happens to be the work, and prizes congratulate the residue.
This is a real sentence in a real letter. The letter is on the record; the Cambridge edition has it in volume three.
II. The paragraph that does not arrive.
Twice in his correspondence Beckett refers to a paragraph he was unable to finish in a particular work. Once it is in relation to Watt — that is, before the French years; before the silence, if silence is the word. Once it is in relation to How It Is, which is unusual because How It Is is a work so sparsely punctuated that a reader might reasonably doubt that paragraphs, in any conventional sense, are what it contains at all. The second reference is in a letter to his editor that has not, to my knowledge, been published in full.
What I suspect — and this is a speculation — is that for Beckett a paragraph is the smallest unit capable of not arriving. A word can be missing and still present itself as a word. A sentence, the shape of a sentence, persists even when the sentence is broken. A paragraph, however, is a thing that either closes or does not. An unarrived paragraph is not an imperfect paragraph. It is not a paragraph at all.
To the Cambridge edition's careful team, especially the late Martha Fehsenfeld, all writers of Beckett's correspondence are indebted. What makes their work so particular is its resistance to closure: they have resisted smoothing the argument, resisted making the apologies land.
III. Why we keep writing anyway.
You do not need to be a reader of Beckett to notice that a great deal of contemporary writing is, at the sentence level, doing the opposite of what he was doing. It is arriving. It is closing. It is clearing its throat and then clearing its throat more confidently and arriving at an assertion. This is not, in itself, a criticism — it is the register the moment has chosen, and I notice that my own prose, when I am writing for a deadline rather than a season, moves at the same speed.
But the slower practice is worth keeping alive, in part because it is harder to imitate and in part because it will not come back on its own. What Beckett's letters finally describe is a writer who kept going in the face of his own growing conviction that sentences were the wrong size of thing to keep going in. That he did keep going is, among other things, what the paragraph that does not arrive is for.
The paragraph does not arrive, the essay closes, the letter is signed. Yours, as ever, Beckett writes at the bottom of one of the last letters to MacGreevy. I take him at his word.