“To talk alone”

Abstract

This article gives a close-reading of Beckett’s letters to Barbara Bray, focusing on the years between their first meeting in 1956 and Bray’s move to Paris in May 1961. In this correspondence Beckett grappled with the difficulties of “human conversation”, as the letters raised questions regarding the construction of the self in dialogue and the (in)ability of language to bridge distance between two individuals. I propose that Happy Days, written between October 1960 and June 1961, emerged from this fraught epistolary process, and that the play can be read as a dramatization of the letter writer’s address to their absent interlocutor. The connection is supported by Beckett’s use of draft fragments of the play-text within the letter exchange itself.