Deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent

Novelist J.M Coetzee reads Samuel Beckett's letters with a mixture of writerly interest and biographical frustration. Yet from the fragments of the edited letters he is able to create this moment of artistic transformation, a portrait of the artist as it were:

Before he discovered Johnson, the writer whom Beckett had elected to identify with was the famously active and productive James Joyce, Shem the Penman. His own early writing, as he cheerfully admits, "stinks of Joyce." But only a handful of letters passed between Beckett and Joyce. The reason is simple: during the times when they were closest (1928–1930, 1937–1940)—times when Beckett acted as Joyce's occasional secretary and general dogsbody—they were living in the same city, Paris. Between these two periods their relations were strained and they did not communicate. The cause of the strain was Beckett's treatment of Joyce's daughter Lucia, who was infatuated with him. Though alarmed by Lucia's evident instability of mind, Beckett, much to his discredit, allowed the relationship to develop. When he finally broke it off, Nora Joyce was furious, accusing him—with some justice—of exploiting the daughter to maintain access to the father.

It was probably not a bad thing for Beckett to be expelled from this dangerous Oedipal territory. By the time he was reenlisted, in 1937, to help with the proofreading of Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), his attitude toward the master had become less fraught, more charitable. To McGreevy he confides:

Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs. work on his proofs.... He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.

And again, two weeks later:

He [Joyce] was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I don't feel the danger of the association any more. He is just a very lovable human being.

The night after he wrote these words Beckett got into a scuffle with a stranger in a Paris street and was stabbed. The knife just missed his lungs; he had to spend two weeks in the hospital. The Joyces did everything they could to help their young compatriot, having him moved to a private ward, bringing him custard puddings. Reports of the assault made it into the Irish newspapers; Beckett's mother and brother traveled to Paris to be at his bedside. Among other unexpected visitors was a woman Beckett had met years earlier, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who would in due course become his companion and then his wife.

The aftermath of the assault, reported to McGreevy with some bemusement, seems to have revealed to Beckett that he was not as alone in the world as he liked to believe; even more curiously, it seemed to confirm him in his decision to make Paris his home.

In this one event Beckett is forced to confront the absurdity, randomness, and meanlingness of existence while also acknowledging the seemingly invisible interconnectedness of human relations. Life is crazy, but worth living. This contradiction becomes, perhaps, the central theme in and motivation behind his later mature work.