A RARE collection of correspondence from Samuel Beckett to two close friends failed to sell at auction in Sotheby’s in London yesterday.
A series of 240 letters, postcards and notes from the playwright to the painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the writer Anne Atik, had been put up for auction with a guide price of between £200,000 and £300,000 (€225,000 and €337,000).
A Sotheby’s spokesman said the letters, which spanned three decades of the writer’s life up to his death in Paris in 1989, had generated a significant amount of interest but several bids had failed to make the reserve price.
Beckett’s correspondence with the Arikhas, written from Paris, Ussy-sur-Marne, Berlin, London and elsewhere, provides a rare insight into the writer’s life.
A similar collection of letters written by Beckett to the painters Henri and Josette Hayden was sold at auction in London in 2006 for €360,000.
The National Library said it had decided against a move to acquire the collection on budgetary grounds.
