The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940, Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld & Lois More Overbeck

"Dear Tom," wrote Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy in 1931, "I wish I could write you a cheerful easy newsy letter like yours to me. I'm inextricably morveux and I beg your pardon." As Beckett readers know, he didn't really do cheerful, or easy or newsy – mostly he did melancholy, opaque and allusive – but by God, he did letters. Did we think he was taciturn, diffident, uncommunicative? On the contrary. The trove of his extant correspondence amounts to 15,000 missives, sent between 1929 and his death in 1989. This book is the first of four volumes which will select 2,500 letters from the torrent of communication that surged through his 60-year writing career.

Beckett approved the project in 1985, on the understanding that the editing process would concentrate on "those passages only having bearing on my work". He also asked the editors: "Please, no commentary." They have done him proud, tactfully avoiding comment on his state of mind, while providing hundreds of pages of context, even if we already knew that "Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)" was a "poet and editor of the Criterion" or that Kia-Ora is "an orange fruit drink, originally lemon, created in Australia and marketed in Britain since 1913".

As to the question of letters "having bearing on my work", their approach has been, rightly, liberal. Given the unique correlation between the voice of his hypersensitive consciousness and the voice of his creative prose, you could argue that everything he uttered had "bearing" on his work. In the years covered by this volume, Beckett was a struggling young writer in London, Germany and his home in Dublin; and a soul in torment. Having resigned from his teaching post at Trinity College, Dublin, he was wrestling with the allusive Dream of Fair to Middling Women, whose sections were plundered for the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and his wonderfully light and likeable first novel, Murphy (1938). Its genesis is traceable in Beckett's hand-to-mouth life in Chelsea, and his trips to watch the kite-fliers in Hyde Park.

They were also the years of his first poems, the surreal spasms called "Eneugs" and "Sanies". When we first encounter him he writing from Germany, deferentially, to his mentor James Joyce in Paris, while struggling to emerge from the great man's shadow. "Of course it stinks of Joyce," he writes of his early Sedendo et Quiescendo, "in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own colours".

He spent most of the 1930s plunged in frustration and depression, spewing poems and stories while professing himself unable to write, reading voraciously, sending work to publishers (including Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press) and magazines, collecting rejection slips, bolting for home and exquisite boredom in Foxrock, alleviated by bicycle rides and solitary pints.

Racked by self-disgust, he applies for jobs he stands little chance of securing. He applies to Milan, Manchester and South Africa, with neither conviction nor success. He contemplates the horror of a job in his father's surveying firm. He wonders if he might give advertising a go. Doomed to inactivity, he comes across as a friendless self-tormenting solipsist, and far from healthy: he complains of rheumatism, pleurisy, impetigo, hammer toes and septic cysts. "I'm depressed," he writes, "the way a slug-ridden cabbage might be expected to be".

The main recipient of his fuming self-criticism and egomania is Thomas McGreevy, his friend from their days at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, who introduced him to Joyce, Richard Aldington, Jack B Yeats and the editor Eugene Jolas. For long periods, McGreevy seems to be Beckett's only correspondent; the neurotic Sam becomes unbuttoned, colloquial and funny writing to him. Sometimes his eloquent, hilarious disgust at successful writers (he calls Huxley's Point Counter Point "Cunt Pointer Cunt") puts one in mind of Larkin's letters to Kingsley Amis.

Beckett's scatological fixations, his running theme of literary effusion as excrement ("My Proust turd") can become tiresome, as can his obscure or inkhorn words: boniments, chiroplatonic, obstipation, eviration, mumper, polypus, gantelope, sinciput ... His epistolary style tends towards obscurantism, allusion and concealment. It's rare to find a whole paragraph that doesn't dip into French, German, Latin, Italian or Spanish quotations, as if anxious to hide the nakedness of his thoughts behind Rimbaud, Dante and Proust. "Every time I take up my pen to write something in English," he complains, "I get the feeling of being depersonalised." It's suddenly no surprise that he later abandoned English to write his plays and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable in French: his letters are already halfway there.

These are not records of action-packed years or political engagement. Beckett seems hardly to notice the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism. Visiting Hamburg and Berlin, he notes disapprovingly that lots of modern art had been relocated to the cellars. He lived through this decade as a devoted, voracious culturevulture, haunting galleries, attending operas and recitals, reading day and night.

His literary tastes, when not self-consciously "phrase-hunting" in Vico's Misogallo or St Augustine's Confessions, are surprisingly conventional. As a boy he read Treasure Island and Oliver Twist. In his twenties, he reads The Mill on the Floss and Moby-Dick. He's a big fan of Keats, Fielding, Lawrence and, amazingly, Jane Austen: "Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me." Of his own work he is disparaging. Even while writing Murphy, he writes "It is poor stuff".

But he's hilariously negative about so many things. He is unimpressed by St Paul's and the British Museum. He attends a lecture by Jung and concludes, "I can't imagine him curing a fly of neurosis." He buys Darwin's Origin of Species and decides, "[I] never read such badly-written catlap." Paintings and recitals leave him almost prostrate with disgust. "You haven't a good word to say for anyone but the failures," he is told by an almost-girlfriend, Nuala Costello. "I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time," he remarks.

What works for him is psychoanalysis, at the hands of Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic. The key letter in this volume is a wonderful epiphany, in March 1935, about the roots of his "misery & solitude & apathy ... an index of superiority" which he now locates in "a diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember, in my 'pre-history,' a bubble on the puddle ... and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most, when the bath is nearly empty." The whole future schema of the Trilogy, and its matchless "pot-holing of the soul," lies in these words. One can hardly wait for Volume Two.

Before Godot: the young Beckett

Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1906, into a Church of Ireland family, Beckett excelled at cricket as well as the studies that took him to Trinity College, Dublin. After graduation in 1927, he became an English teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1929, his first published work defended his new friend and mentor, James Joyce (left). After lecturing at Trinity, he travelled in Europe, underwent psychoanalysis in London, and in 1938 published a first novel, 'Murphy', before settling in Paris.

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