Summer Sale

The highlight during Sotheby’s summer sale of English Literature and History on 12 July will certainly be the set of 17 letters and 77 postcards Samuel Beckett sent to his aunt Peggy Beckett and his uncle James between 12 February 1965 and 23 February 1978. The letters are mainly of biographical interest and contain much detail about his daily life, health, travel plans and family news, but there are a good many references to his work, particularly the endless and strenuous rehearsals of Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, as well as his literary preoccupations such as proof reading and translating, not to mention social obligations and the never-ending stream of letters that needed to be answered. A recurrent motif seems to be how tired and overwhelmed he is, and in one wry, ironic moment, having arrived in his house in Ussy where the weather was terrible, he writes: “Back here yesterday to try a brief stay. […] Everything wopping wet under a black sky. Only bright spot a blackbird”. Given the interest of these materials to professional biographers and to the editors of Beckett’s correspondence (to be published by Cambridge University Press), university libraries will be certain to compete for this collection. (In December 2006, another cache of letters to Beckett’s artist friends Henri and Josette Hayden sold at Sotheby’s for €360,000.)

The same can probably not be said for the correspondence between Ted Hughes and Sir Christopher Lever about the Save the Rhino Appeal. These letters, however, give an insight in Hughes’ ecological engagement, and they demonstrate how his poetry, his passion for fishing and his charity work all flowed into one another. The correspondence begins in October 1986 with a request for Sir Christopher Lever for a manuscript poem to be auctioned at a special charity event at Sotheby’s. Hughes happily obliged and entertained a number of spin-off ideas to raise more money: he arranged for publication of the poem in the Sunday Telegraph; he negotiated with British Airways and Charles Branson of Virgin to insert the poem as a fold-out in their in-flight magazine on African routes; and he suggested a limited edition to be published by The Rampant Lions Press. The limited edition, in any case, seems to have fallen through, but the letters give quite a good insight about Hughes’ expertise in limited edition publishing. Students in the history of the twentieth-century book will want to read these documents for the details they contain about paper and papermaking, book sizes, costs and so on.

Other manuscript items included in the sale are an autograph fair copy containing 24 lines of Seamus Heaney’s “Elegy”, inscribed to Shozun-Tokenaga and presumably specially copied for him. The manuscript shows no variant readings from the printed version and has thus association value only. Nonetheless, such items are important to understanding the value poets—and the culture as a whole—put on manuscripts.

There is also an autograph fair copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Horses”, presumably dating from 1897, which was used as printer’s copy. At the top of the document is an instruction to the printer as to where he has to return the proof. The manuscript contains several small alterations and a cancelled and revised version of stanza 9. The differences between the deleted and the rewritten stanza, however, are minimal; while not exactly a currente calamo revision, the impression is that Kipling anticipated the changes to be greater than they actually would turn out to be, as he was recomposing the poem in his head. With this manuscript, is also a corrected proof.

Last week Christie’s sold a postcard from James Joyce to Sean O’Casey from May 1939 on The Irish Times’ misattribution of Finnegans Wake to the Irish playwright.