But that makes the letters of these years all the more precious. Beckett, by all accounts, was the most courteous of men, and it seems that even at the height of his fame he still tried to answer as courteously as he could the hundreds of letters he received. But the sixty-year-old smiling (or, more often, in the photos we have of him, scowling) public man now knew exactly where his priorities lay: after spending the mornings on his correspondence he would devote the afternoons to his own writing. In the 1930s, however, there was no public man, and we have to see the letters as merely one of many ways in which an ambitious, confused and tormented young writer attempted to discover who he was and what it was he wanted out of life and art. These early letters, in other words, are, like the early poems and stories, in the strict sense essais, the trying out of a voice, a tone, even, at times, another language.