Hugh Haughton
NOT YET I
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940
Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge University Press 782pp £30)

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Samuel Beckett changed the ways we see the world. He did so by transforming the genres we use to represent it, remaking them in the light of his grand inquisitorial playfulness. Despite his endlessly self-effacing way of writing, plays like Endgame, novels like Molloy, and a host of inscrutable poems, essays and prose fragments, bear his unmistakable signature. They announce on every page: Beckett was here.

It is perhaps paradoxical that such a minimalist should have had such a maximal effect, and an opponent of biographical readings of art such a high biographical profile (witness the big biographies by Deirdre Bair, Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, and innumerable iconic photos). Beckett was a prolific as well as obscure minimalist and his fans and 'biografiends' have been waiting a long time for the light to be thrown from his huge correspondence. The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 is the 700-page first instalment of a four-volume 'comprehensive' selection (later to be published complete in twelve or more volumes). The correspondence, much of which was written in Beckett's elegant but almost indecipherable 'Ogham script', is edited with almost manic scruple by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, charged by Beckett in 1985 with the task of 'its reduction to those passages only having a bearing on my work'.

It is our good fortune that the editors, in consultation with the writer's nephew Edward Beckett, have taken a relatively broad-brush view of what has 'a bearing'. The volume begins with a letter to Joyce from late 1929, discussing the 'latest insertion' in the 23-year-old Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the book of essays on Finnegans Wake in which he first made his mark, and goes on to trace the vicissitudes of a terrifyingly well-read young Irish writer seeking to escape the shadow of Joyce, Ireland (in 1931 he says he 'underestimated this terrible Dublin') and 'the Irish people' (who, he tells Thomas MacGreevy, he can't imagine 'ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever'). The general outline is familiar from the biographies, but the letters lovingly document Beckett's exasperated search for a modus vivendi (or scribendi) - 'I shall never learn what to do with my tither of life' - as well as a congenial locus vivendi. The decade covered by these letters is a history of intellectual listlessness and displacement - from Paris, Dublin, London and Germany. On the literary front, these are the years that saw the publication of the essay on Joyce, his first and only critical book (Proust, 1931), the short stories of More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), the poems of Echo's Bones (1935), his first published novel, Murphy (1938), memorably dismissed by Dylan Thomas as 'Sodom and Begorrah', and discussions about his first but never completed play, Human Wishes, about Samuel Johnson (who 'being spiritually self conscious was a tragic figure, is worth putting down as part of the whole of which oneself is a part'). Beckett being Beckett, the tragicomic vanity of human wishes is never far away. Nevertheless, one of the glories of this volume is how early, completely and comprehensively Beckett was Beckett. Whether in Dublin, Paris, Hamburg, Foxrock or London, the mordant, learned, Dantesque Hiberno-French comedian of the impasse is never in better form that when commenting on the bad form of life ('I would like to live in a perpetual September. One does one's best to prefer Spring, in vain').

Apart from chronicling his arrival as critic, poet and fiction writer, we see Beckett in his flitting and ill-fitting roles of lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin (in 1930 he complains of the 'grotesque comedy of lecturing'), lecteur in English at the Sorbonne, art tourist in Nazi Germany ('Germany is horrible ... All the modern pictures are in the cellars'), psychoanalytic patient with Wilfred Bion in London, literary critic for little magazines, and victim of a random stabbing in Paris ('How lovely it is being here. Even with a hole in the side. A sunlit surface yesterday brighter than the whole of Ireland's summer'). We also glimpse him pondering becoming an apprentice film director with Eisenstein in Moscow, deciding to train as a 'commercial pilot' (a real Irish Airman), applying for a job as lecturer in Italian in Cape Town, and settling permanently in Dublin ('I may as well make up my mind to be a vegetable'). At the heart of this volume is his correspondence with his fellow Irish poet MacGreevy, an art historian, Catholic and nationalist, who proved a perfect sounding board for Beckett's discussions of poems, stories, and literary plans, as well as a receptacle for his peculiar 'very baroque solipsism' in which God is replaced 'by a pleroma only to be sought among my own feathers and entrails'.

Entrails are in plentiful supply. In 1933 Beckett speaks of his writing as verbal 'sanies' (or 'morbid discharges'), the title he gave to two of his poems. Discussing his first book on Proust, he said he was 'looking forward to pulling the balls of the critical & poetical Proustian cock' and didn't know whether 'the Proustian arse-hole' should be considered as 'entrée or sortie'. He told Samuel Putnam he wanted 'a proper booze before I return - like a constipated Eurydice to the shades of shit'. He told Charles Prentice at Chatto that his fiction 'stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours'. He defines a temperance hotel as 'a celibate brothel', talked of Huxley's 'Cunt Countercunt', said after a neck operation, 'It's an ill cyst that blows nobody any good', and called Samuel Johnson a 'Platonic gigolo ... with not a testicle, auricle or ventricle to stand on'.

But the letters also show a writer with an exacting eye for art of all kinds - painting from all periods, music, philosophy and literature - and an exacting sense of one of the main problems of aesthetic creation: authentic speech. In 1932 he speaks of translating from German - 'done in the eye into Dublin stutter' - and anticipates the way he later transformed stuttering into an art: 'I'm not ashamed to stutter like this with you who are used to my wild ways of failing to say what I imagine I want to say and who understand that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must stutter or rest.' In the same letter, he offers a prophetically retrospective account of rambles in the Dublin Mountains which are the locus and focus for so much later Beckett: 'I walk immeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk.' At such points the letter writer inevitably merges with Belacqua Shuah, the hero of More Pricks Than Kicks, and the peripatetic memorialist of the post-war work: 'For me walking, the mind ... is a carrefour of memories, Moulin à larmes' (a cross-roads of memory, a tear-mill). He writes of people flying kites in London, calling them 'absolutely disinterested, like a poem, or useful ... where demand and supply coincide, and the prayer is the god'. Art was Beckett's kite, and, as he adds with twisted Irish Protestant panache, 'Poems are prayers, Dives and Lazarus of one flesh'.

By the end of the volume, the first major stage of his journey is at an end. Beckett is established in his famous garret at 6 rue des Favorites, is surrounded by 'queer pictures' by J B Yeats and contemporary Germans, has published Murphy, has begun writing poems in French, and is hatching a first play. Celebrating his thirty-third birthday in April 1938, he wonders 'if the second half of the bottle will be any better than the first half' (on the assumption 'one has got used to the taste'). With war imminent, he tells MacGreevy he will place himself 'at the disposition of this country' (ie France), and has recently met 'a French girl also, who I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me' (signalling the arrival of Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who would be his life's companion): 'Maybe the wine is not so bad as I feared.'

In June 1940, however, the correspondence breaks off, as Beckett and Suzanne flee Paris prior to the Nazi invasion. It would not be resumed until the end of the war. In this volume's final letter, Beckett says: 'You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose: a self that you did not know, if you are lucky.' ('Unless you are a dealer', he added.) Beckett could not have known that in the next five years, during the interruption occasioned by the war, he would lay the foundations of a writing self he certainly could not have anticipated, the author of Waiting for Godot, the novel trilogy and other stripped post-war texts that would change the face of modern writing.

Writing earlier to Mary Manning Howe of his German trip ('a journey from and not to'), he says he didn't have the energy to 'make it clear to myself', but had 'an instinctive respect, at least, for what is real, & therefore has not in its nature, to be clear'. He adds that 'when somehow this goes over into words, one is called an obscurantist', but it is 'the classifiers are the obscurantists'. Nevertheless Beckett's correspondence is 'be-thicketed' (in Paul Muldoon's phrase) with obscure local and cultural allusions, and the editorial team, with their astonishingly detailed annotations, are to be congratulated for making the life work of this heroically perverse illuminist a lot clearer.

Hugh Haughton is the author of 'The Poetry of Derek Mahon' (OUP, 2007) and co-editor (with Valerie Eliot) of Volume II of 'The Letters of T S Eliot' (to be published later this year). He teaches English at the University of York.