“Beckett was profoundly marked by the horrors of war and Occupation – just how profoundly, the editors point out, is attested by the fact that he did not refer to them anywhere, with the exception of a radio broadcast paying tribute to the work of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô in Normandy, where Beckett was a volunteer in 1945–6: “some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again”. This “vision and sense” and the experiences that gave rise to it, never explicitly touched on, nonetheless haunt everything Beckett subsequently created: worlds in which unexplained disappearances and displacements, systematized cruelty and the eruption of brutal, seemingly unmotivated violence are only to be expected. And, [Dan] Gunn suggests, they haunt his letters too:

“gone – or almost – are the fizzing tirades of the early years, the self-pity, the rancour, the occasional self-indulgent displays of cleverness, almost as if so much suffering had put the cap forever on a merely personal expression of disadvantage or misprision … . As if bitterness had been transmuted into something more deeply reflective: not an acceptance of horror and injustice, but an acceptance of the communality of loss and the reversibility of the roles of victim and persecutor.””