Images of Beckett - Index of

that he added to the foot or on the back of the letter
itself, or, alternatively, by a system of symbols
agreed with his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon’s
secretary at Les Editions de Minuit. She then
answered these letters for him, often with a
number of standard replies: ‘Mr Beckett never
gives interviews’; ‘Mr Beckett does not read theses
and manuscripts about his work’; ‘Mr Beckett is
away in the country.’ The last comment was not
always true, but it provided a plausible excuse and
was often the only way for him to carve out sizeable
slices of time for his writing.
These efforts to achieve a calm, untroubled
existence in Paris were, however, doomed to
failure – primarily on account of his own generous
nature. He simply could not bring himself to say
‘no’ to friends who were travelling to the capital in
the hope of seeing him. So he would rush in from
the country especially to meet them for lunch or for
drinks, leaving the house at 5.30 in the morning in
his modest little grey Citroën Deux-Chevaux to
catch the 6 o’clock train from the nearby town of
La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. He was often sent recorded
packages. If he happened to be out at the time of
delivery, he then had to queue at the post office to
extricate material, which, most of the time, he did
not want; ‘ please don’t send it to me recorded
delivery’, he would plead plaintively. At home he
had no secretarial help, since neither he nor his
French wife, Suzanne, could bear to have someone
coming regularly into their apartment. For a short
Samuel Beckett, 1973