To mention the requirement for a measure of linguistic estrangement was surely a generous clue, pointing as it does towards the literary strength that Beckett would eventually draw from a courted inability to be at ease in either suppression or expression — "weary of silence, soon sickened by words". George Craig, the editor responsible for the often subtle translations of Beckett's French in this volume, says that one of his goals was to "stretch English to a point where it will allow a glimpse of the sheer strangeness of Beckett's French". One of the conditions of that enabling strangeness in French was the fading but never entirely vanished presence of English in Beckett's mind, as a kind of salutary linguistic vexation.

But in the original French, that last phrase to Naumann reads: "le besoin d'être mal armé." It is impossible not to hear the pun: "d'être Mallarmé". The very expression of impediment is at the same time the expression of the most exorbitant literary ambition — nothing less than actually to be Stéphane Mallarmé! The younger Beckett had not cared for that particular poet. Writing to Tom McGreevy on October 18, 1932, he grumbled: "I was trying to like Mallarmé again the other day, & couldn't, because it's Jesuitical poetry, even the Swan & Hérodiade. I suppose I'm a dirty low-church P. even in poetry." Later, this opinion would change, perhaps under the influence of Georges Duthuit, whose criticism juxtaposed the work of artists such as Vuillard and Moreau with Mallarmé's verse. In the late 1940s Beckett would translate Mallarmé's "Edouard Manet" for Duthuit's Transitions. The taste for Mallarmé took hold. James Knowlson records that in the late 1970s, Beckett spent comparatively little of his time now reading modern literature but regularly went back to what he called the "old chestnuts" — one of which was the poetry of Mallarmé.

The doubleness of that moment in the letter to Naumann takes us to the heart of the aesthetic Beckett was forging during this period. It was an aesthetic assembled from impoverishment, impediment and impotence, and first glimpsed obliquely in the course of a long correspondence with Georges Duthuit on the subject of the paintings of Bram van Velde. In part it was a transcription of the bare life that Beckett was then leading — "a quiet and meagre life. With no friends, with only work to give it meaning." To some extent there was no choice about this. Incidental comments shed light on the harsh conditions of life in Paris immediately after the war: "The winter is setting in now in Paris. No heating in this house for the 6th year in succession. Things are very bad, with a badness that won't lead anywhere I fear." Material conditions were, he said, "appalling", and would stay so for many years. An arresting detail in a letter of 1956 illustrates the point: "Eating fresh pineapple for the first time in my life with ferocious enjoyment."  

But with Beckett this immiseration was not wholly imposed. The site of the cottage he had built in the Marne valley was chosen because the undramatic sparseness of the countryside was attuned to his unusual notions of what was desirable in landscape: "I should like to get out of Paris myself, not to the south, to flat green country, not too green but as flat as possible, with only woods interrupting the horizons." (Beckett's interest in trees and the extensive plantings he carried out on his land are mentioned in many of these letters.) This severity of life was not absolutely unrelieved. The prospect of a visit to Paris from his American publisher, Barney Rosset, provokes a spasm of at least imagined conviviality: 

Few things would give me more pleasure than to see you in Paris next month, this month or any month, with I hope Loly on your arm, and with my ill-gottens to buy for us spirals of apéritifs and bring you to Bobino and supper with buckets of Beaujolais and Sancerre at the ever satisfactory Marquesas. 

But this Rabelaisian Beckett was not often allowed out, at least in his correspondence.