In February 1985 and again in a letter of March 18 to Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Samuel Beckett authorized an edition of his letters, to be gathered during his lifetime and published after his death. But there was a caveat: the correspondence was to be reduced “to those passages only having bearing on my work.” It was not clear what he meant by “my work.” Jérôme Lindon, Beckett’s literary executor, maintained that the letters to be published must be only those that mentioned individual works or Beckett’s oeuvre. This would have entailed publishing only letters such as those that Beckett addressed to Alan Schneider on the production of Endgame and other plays that Schneider was to direct under Beckett’s instructions: these letters have been published as No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider edited by Maurice Harmon (1998). But the editors of the present letters, Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck, held, modifying the caveat, “that the letters themselves are important acts of writing, and signal Beckett’s relation to other writers and artists.”¹ Neither side yielded, but Lindon resolved the dispute in April 2001 by dying. His successor, Beckett’s nephew Edward, agreed with Fehsenfeld and Overbeck. The caveat, in effect, has lapsed. 

In any case, the editors have taken a relaxed view of it. For instance, if any of the 15,000 letters they have collected refer to Beckett’s amours—but they probably don’t, Beckett