“… the story these letters tell, inescapably, is the banal tale of the dream come true, of long labours at last rewarded. And that is one reason they make such good reading. (…) in December of [1950] he is able to tell George Reavey: ‘I have signed a contract with the Editions of Minuit for all work’ and ‘Pretty well certain now that the second play, En attendant Godot, will be put on by Blin at the Noctambules.’

In truth there would be another two frustrated years waiting for finance before Godot premiered on 5 January 1953. Anyone who has read these two volumes of letters will sense at once where the idea of the interminable wait for some life-changing encounter, ever announced, never materialising, perhaps feared as much as hoped, came from. Beckett was now 46 and had been waiting twenty years. ‘Godot himself,’ he later writes, ‘is not of a different species from those he cannot or will not help. I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed.’ A good publisher and a fine director with adequate financial support might have been one, superficial answer to that question.”