The contradictory nature of Beckett is everywhere in evidence here. On one hand there’s the fastidiousness about the “leaves too many.” On the other is the fierce self-deprecation and disengagement, whereby “Watt” is “my regrettable novel,” " ‘Godot’ was written either between ‘Molloy’ and ‘Malone’ or between ‘Malone’ and ‘L’Innommable,’ I can’t remember,” and, about his radio play “Embers,” “Hate the sight of it in both ­languages.”

This last occurs in a letter of Dec. 1, 1959, to Barbara Bray, the BBC drama producer who oversaw the 1958 version of “All That Fall,” Beckett’s first radio play. The editing of this third volume of “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” is no less exemplary than that with which we’ve come to be familiar from the first and second, but the entry on Bray in the “Profiles” section is a masterpiece of tact and tacitness:

“Few people can have come so close to SB. Lively, inventive and with a strong literary sensibility, she was the ideal person to help him through his characteristic lack of confidence about the new medium — not least because she saw at once that it was perhaps, of all the media, the one best suited to his gifts. SB was soon to feel totally at home with the BBC Sound Drama team (the others at that time were Donald McWhinnie and John Morris), but his connection with Bray, while unfailingly and productively professional, went well beyond that.”

Why radio might be the medium “best suited” to Beckett comes down to a single concept — silence. No writer has understood the power of silence better than Beckett. No one has understood better than Beckett that silence is not an absence of sound but a physical presence, perhaps even a character. That certainly seems to be the case with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” the monologue he wrote for Patrick Magee, which is the single greatest evocation of loss and longing of the 20th century. (Beckett’s affection for Magee is one of the many heartwarming discoveries of this volume.) It’s no accident, so, that it was an icon of the “silent” era, Buster Kea­ton, who would star in Beckett’s “Film” (1965), shot in some of the more dilapidated areas of Lower Manhattan.

The slapstick humor we associate with much of Beckett’s work is rarely to be seen in the letters. Knockabout gives way to nuance. For example, in 1959 he writes to Bray about his experience of reading “Doctor Zhivago,” a copy of which she had given him as a present:

“I have finished Pasternak with mixed feelings, which is more than I hoped for.”

In 1958, meanwhile, he’d written to Bray of the death of her estranged husband with what we come to recognize as his trademark tenderness:

“All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out.”

It’s the phrase “I’ve been told” that is the clincher here. It is wry in the face of wretchedness, sly in the face of the onslaught, and it rather cleverly hints to a recent victim of viduity that someone who might yet be capable of love may be waiting in the wings.