The kicker, here and elsewhere, is Beckett’s uncanny multilingualism. (Remember, this is the man they entrusted with the translation of portions of “Work in Progress,” a k a “Finnegans Wake,” into French.) Italian phrases and poems judiciously and joyfully pepper these letters, and never gratuitously: Beckett seems practically incapable of an unconscientious utterance. Among the most affecting streams of correspondence is the one he conducts with his teenage cousin in Dublin, a promising student of modern languages. Lucky, lucky fellow, because from Beckett he receives long letters in French and German that are master­pieces of mentorship: learned, utterly uncondescending, self-revealing, personal. (The editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, throughout provide translations — executed by George Craig, Dan Gunn and Viola Westbrook — of all foreign-language letters.) It is to the youngster that Beckett makes the crucial admission (in German) that “no sooner do I take up my pen to compose something in English than I get the feeling of being ‘de-personified.’ ”

Although there are no letters here to his parents — perhaps because Beckett authorized the publication only of letters “having bearing on my work”? — there is no doubt he remained deeply preoccupied by “the fading fact of my family.” He notes: “Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveler. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under color of admiring the view. I’ll never have anyone like him.” Several months later, the father dies. The son says, “I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.”

This bereavement was, no doubt, one of the events that influenced the progressive calming, over the years, of Beckett’s tone. About the possible Nazi invasion, he writes from Paris: “No matter how things go I shall stay on here. . . . All I have to lose is legs, arms, balls etc., and I owe them no particular debt of gratitude as far as I know.” There is little sign, in these ­pages, of sustained attention to political and economic crises. The Great Depression is not mentioned, and Hitler and his cronies figure, briefly, as absurdities; even when he travels in Nazi Germany in 1936-37, Beckett’s focus is on galleries and churches. The future member of the Resistance has yet to show himself. In June 1940, he writes from Paris: “Suzanne seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?”

Suzanne is Suzanne Deschevaux-­Dumesnil. Here’s how we learn of her: “There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last.” Beckettists will know, of course, that in due time Suzanne and Sam married, and that the marriage lasted till their deaths.

The knowledge of what lay ahead for Beckett — the writing of the plays and the great prose fiction — makes one very impatient for the further volumes of letters, almost as if Beckett were in actual correspondence with oneself. I know a little about what this might feel like. Many years ago, while languishing like Murphy in a London flat, I received an airmail envelope on which my name had been scratched with a ballpoint pen. I had no idea who could be writing to me from France, so unthinkingly I tore open the envelope. I wish I’d been more careful. The envelope contained a very short, playful message from Samuel Beckett. It’s still my most precious possession.