George Craig, Sylph Editions, Beckett's Letters

A few weeks ago I googled George Craig, the teacher who fully inhabited my reading/writing life in the sixties and seventies. I found a eulogy; he had died a year before. I hadn't seen him for maybe forty years. The last time we met, at Brighton station, there was a caravan in the concourse with a banner over it: LETTERS ARE BETTER.

George and I got to know each other by letter. A piece of life in the wrong order, he said. Maybe the wrong order is the right order. Letters are indeed better. In a letter you can say, he was able to say, that he was attracted by certain directions of my mind, and thus could bypass the tutor/student form and confer on me the status of Real Person. He was in Sussex, teaching; I was in Paris, learning. I was twenty; he was thirty-six.

I read his letters over breakfast in the apartment where I was au pair. A cover page closely written on both sides, with two or three more pages on thinner paper, closely written on both sides, barely room for the signature at the bottom of the last page. The maid asked me if I was reading a novel. Of a sort, yes. A bottomless set of discriminations and refinements of approach, in the margins, between the lines, run through with apology, disclaimer and reassurance. I was not used to this kind of attention and concern.

George was diffident, circuitous, he could modify his modification of the situation till the pages grew into each other. Along with Rimbaud Blanchot Nerval Michaux et al. Along with revolution. George Craig's letters and the reading he influenced or suggested, refined almost everything that year, and for many years.  I read the letters often.

Later I went to live and teach in Ireland, where he grew up. I saw faces that reminded me of George, and of Beckett. I found his irishness, his diffidence, his apology. Our correspondence started up again, with new shifts in prolixity: subjects formerly inadmissible entered and were scrutinised. We were intimate and maybe easier on the page yet in truth no more intimate than before. Periodically I wondered what was the whole thing with George and why did it trouble me, what was this plateau on which for many years we had danced our private dance?

As well as the bundle of George's letters, tied around with thin cord in the old way, I have been reading his Sylph Cahier on Writing Beckett's Letters. After he finished teaching he spent fifteen years on the translation of letters Beckett wrote in French. Anything George wrote sounds like George. I can hear him saying it, even when he's writing; wrestling with something, call it the finer points, as students later said I was wrestling, they didn't know with what but something resonated and we all felt a surge.