Speaking of Godot, Beckett described what he was aiming at when writing: "What is at issue is a speaking whose function is not so much that of having a meaning as of putting up a struggle, poor I hope, against silence, and leading back to it." The flash of defiant, paradoxical wit in "poor I hope" shows how far Beckett was from being humbled by this apparently abject writerly posture, in which he discovered possibilities of proud inflexibility. In declining to allow his name to be considered for election to the Irish Academy, he wrote in discomfort but without apology to the man who had wished to propose him, Seumas O'Sullivan: "I should be distressed if you were to think of me, because of this, as unfriendly or systematically aloof." Well, maybe not systematically aloof; but that disclaimer still leaves the door open for a good deal of opportunistic aloofness, and a number of instances occur in the letters gathered in this volume.  

Unsolicited inquiries about literary meaning were liable to be dealt with imperiously, as in the case of the hapless Michel Polac of Radiodiffusion Française. Polac was putting on extracts from Godot and had approached Beckett for guidance. Whatever the strangeness of Beckett's usage in the French language, his reply shows that he had acquired a high degree of skill in the well-known French technique of using elaborate courtesy as an instrument for the better delivery of an uppercut:

Vous me demandez mes idées sur "En Attendant Godot", dont vous me faites l'honneur de donner des extraits au "Club d'Essai", et en même temps mes idées sur le théâtre.

Je n'ai pas d'idées sur le théâtre. Je n'y connais rien. Je n'y vais pas. C'est admissible.

Others might be handled more gently.  Jacoba van Velde, whom Beckett had suggested as the translator of Godot into Dutch, was invited to ask questions of its author: "Demandez-moi tout ce que vous voulez à ce sujet." Not the same thing, of course, as an undertaking to tell everything on that subject; but still, not quite so redolent of a slamming door as was that letter to Polac. 

When this edition of Beckett's letters was being planned, it must have been tempting for the editors to adopt a policy of printing only translations of the letters written in French. In deciding to print both originals and translations, they have greatly increased the size of the edition, but their view that this was a price worth paying was undoubtedly the right one: as they say, "It makes Beckett's original available to the reader, as well as conveying their sense and something of their tone to the reader without French."