Hugh Kenner

His central preoccupation is probably the nature of sincerity.

What are you doing when you are making a statement that comes from your deepest self?

And is there a self beneath that self?

The books and the plays increasingly confront a character with voices coming from deeper and deeper levels of his own being.

so that he does not know himself where they are coming from, is astonished by these verses and is accused by them.

It never comes up spontaneously.

I have had just recently a card from him containing the statement that he will not come to Dublin ever again.

That's the only explicit statement about Ireland I've ever heard from him.

Well, it's a few of the difficulties I went through to find him.

This was 1958.

Nobody had ever seen Beckett at that time, as far as I knew.

And he had a reputation for never answering letters.

On the way to Paris, I had read a French detective story

and learned in the detective story about the pneumatic.

You could buy a form at a post office.

It went through a pneumatic tube, through the series of powers, and a boy on a bicycle delivered it to the addressee and said, will there be any reply?

I thought this might get him around the block about answering mail.

So I did exactly what the man in the detective story did.

I went into the post office, I recited the proper line, was given a form, and wrote a letter.

handed her over the counter, went back to my hotel and waited.