How It Is

Together with
Molloy, How It Is
counts for many as Samuel Beckett’s truest accomplishment in the novel form. It is
also his most difficult fiction, from a stylistic point of view and for the extremity
of its vision. It furthers by radical means but also recapitulates the themes of reduced
circumstance and the search for self that are the focus of the earlier novels (
Molloy,
Malone
Dies
and
The
Unnamable
). At a late stage in the composition, Beckett toyed briefly with making the continuities
explicit, writing an insertion in the margin of the typescript
1
that linked the narrator of
How
It
Is
to Molloy and Malone (and by extension to the multi-named narrator of
The
Unnamable
).

After his mother’s death in 1950, the inheritance Beckett shared with his brother
Frank enabled him to purchase a plot of land and build a modest house near the village
of Ussy-sur-Marne, sixty kilometres away from the bustle of Paris. As his fame grew,
after
Waiting
for
Godot
, he came to depend more and more on this country retreat, far from admirers and callers.
It was at Ussy that, in December 1958, he began to compose
How
It
Is
in French.
2
Besides writing, he also gardened and with Frank’s help planted many different species
of trees. His correspondence from this period contains several references to an ongoing
battle with the moles that infested the property and tore up his plant beds.

The earliest versions of
How It Is
contain references to moles, and to callers, and to a scribbler relaxing at his cottage
in the country.
3
But although Beckett often began with images from his own experience, he would later
remove autobiographical details and dismantle chronological and causal relationships,
replacing them with abstract forms that have a coherence of their own.
4
Thus the first version of the French text includes
lengthy passages explaining the total darkness in which the narrator lives, and invoking
the all-too-trivial moles who manage to be punctual in their comings and goings without
benefit of alternating day and night.
5
After several drafts, Beckett simply asserts the existence of ‘impenetrable dark’.
Again, after a review of the various types of callers he has known in past lives,
the narrator’s solitude is initially explained by a thorough examination of circumstance
and probability.
6
Beckett then cancels the passage and summarises in a few words: ‘long wrangle so
minute that moments when yes to be feared’, then simply affirms ‘no callers this time’.

Likewise, the narrator’s continued survival seems at first to require some explanation
grounded in realism. The contents of the all-important sack satisfy the need for food;
Beckett then finds an analogous explanation of his means of satisfying thirst, before
settling for a brief refusal to explain: ‘mouth opens the tongue comes out lolls in
the mud and no question of thirst either’. It’s as simple as that. We have a character
alone, in constant darkness, able to subsist. Which is all that is needed for the
narration to proceed and, in the end, is all we are given. This is How It Is. Realism,
causality and explanation are written out of the text. The narrator crawls through
mud and darkness without knowing where he comes from or where he is going, and certainly
not why. He drags with him a sack containing tins of food, the origin of which is
a mystery to him. On his journey he meets another whom he calls Pim and with whom
he has a brief, abusive relationship. In
How It Is
, Beckett continues to strip away conventional forms, as if to adumbrate the ‘peeling
the onion’ metaphor ventured in his earlier critical book on Proust.

Congruently, from version to version, the work metamorphoses into a mosaic of broken
phrases scattered and reassembled into three sections of equal length, whose motifs
(solitude, company, solitude) assert an aesthetic rather than narrative symmetry.
As with the last pages of
The
Unnamable
and the thirteen short
Texts
for
Nothing
(1967), early drafts of the novel
string together lengthy sentences made up of short, independent phrases punctuated
by commas. Beckett worked in French, as with the trilogy and
Texts
for
nothing
, all of which he subsequently rendered into English. Unlike
Molloy,
Malone
Dies
and
The
Unnamable
, which were written at speed, he struggled with several versions of
How
It
Is
. He complains in his correspondence of how ‘horribly difficult’ the writing process
is. Though he seems to have known that it would be a full-length work, the first drafts
are only a few pages long, as if he is uncertain of how to proceed.

After the fourth complete prose version of the novel, Beckett suddenly decided to
change radically the layout of the text, in order to foreground the broken rhythms.
Revising his most recent typescript, he inserted forward slashes throughout, at points
where he decided to sub-divide or fragment the prose. Rather than units of meaning,
these fragments re-configure the narrative as units of breath. Occasionally the narrator
stops to ponder what he is saying, but mostly he pauses only to take breath before
continuing. The fragments themselves do not necessarily constitute wholes, or correspond
to any perceptible semantic organisation. In some cases, a theme, or even a phrase
straddles two fragments. In others, a single fragment yokes wildly disparate subject-matter.

Just as he was engaged in experimenting with his text, Beckett was invited by his
American publisher, Barney Rosset, to submit something for
Evergreen
Review
, the house magazine of Grove Press. He naturally turned to work in progress, or rather
to producing an English version of it, no doubt sensing an opportunity to try out
the new form so peculiar to
How
It
Is.
The excerpt – an early version of the opening pages of the novel – appeared in the
September 1960 issue under the title
From
an
Unabandoned Work,
alluding to the title of an earlier story which he had published in
Evergreen
Review
.
7
On returning to the text in French, Beckett knew that he had found the form he needed:
one devoid of punctuation and making scant use of the sentence to build a sustained
narrative. Although it was to become a
commonplace to say that Beckett wrote without punctuation and with minimal syntax,
this is in fact his only unpunctuated text (if we except the punctuating role of the
spaces between fragments). Even the short prose works that followed in the 1960s have
an upper case letter at the beginning and a final stop at the end, and many are punctuated
throughout with commas.

Beckett took pains with the published text to clarify for readers the integrity of
the individual units. For the French original (
Comment
c’est,
Éditions de Minuit, 1961), he instructed that each page end either with an incomplete
line (making clear that the fragment was ending) or with a hyphen (making clear that
the fragment continues over-page). For the English edition (New York: Grove Press;
London: Calder and Boyars; both 1964) he eschewed altogether the page-breaking of
fragments, preferring to vary the amount of space between fragments so as to avoid
any overflow onto the next page – while still requiring that the last line of each
page be incomplete. In his unbound copy of the Calder and Boyars edition, Beckett
makes a change in wording at one point in order to shorten the final line of a page.

Stylistically,
How
It
Is
mostly comprises short word-groups which rarely extend to sentences. The narrator’s
monologue is made up of false starts, of self-corrections, interruptions and repetition.
There is a relative scarcity of grammatical linkages (prepositions, conjunctions,
relative pronouns); rather, meaning is created through juxtaposition. In such a stylistically
stringent environment, repetition is a crucial organisational as well as expressive
resource. Word-groups become familiar as units of meaning thanks to frequent repetition.
These brief phrases are scattered about the text, inserted in the midst of other phrases,
punctuating and dividing them into shorter units, parsing the narrative. Besides the
repetition of words, there is also repetition of sense through synonymy, as the narrator
searches for the correct word amid repeated false starts. Such insertions, interruptions
and corrections reinforce the curtailed rhythms. The result is unsuspectingly close
to everyday, informal speech, and
many commentators have pointed out how much
How
It
Is
benefits from reading aloud.

By way of example, the word-string ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in
me when the panting stops’. This sequence cannot immediately be parsed as grammatical
prose. Lacking the familiar guides of punctuation, capitalisation and prepositional
linkage, we must slow our reading and look at each word. We might at first read ‘voice
once without quaqua’ but then we encounter ‘voice once without’ repeated again and
realise that it is a unit, that
without
is an adverb, the opposite of
within
(‘in me’) and that
quaqua
belongs to the next unit, ‘quaqua on all sides’, which repeats and clarifies ‘voice
once without’. The rhythm of the text begins to insinuate itself. A voice is talking
non-stop, yet uncertain of what needs to be said, repeating itself, pausing only to
take in air. Throughout the text, the combinatory force of these elements creates
new meanings.

On publication, critics were perplexed equally by the form and by the starkly symbolic
content. Since the novel was clearly not written in prose sentences, many assumed
that it was not a novel but a poem of sorts. Nor was it obviously in verse, however,
and some French critics used the term
versets
(referring to a biblical verse or versicle) to describe the units. On the one hand,
it was assumed that where there were no sentences there could be no novel, thereby
identifying a genre with a medium (overlooking novels in verse). On the other hand,
this logic assumes only two forms of discourse, prose and verse, whereas
How
It
Is
exploits a third: namely speech. It is customary for Beckett’s works to produce in
the reader or spectator an experience similar to that being lived through and articulated
by the narrator or speaker. Reading
How
It
Is
aloud brings the reader in close to the narrator’s own bewilderment at this seemingly
disjointed monologue originating from elsewhere, at the same time as making the syntax
audible, the sense apparent, the text intelligible. Baffling at first, the unpunctuated
sequence of words organises itself into an unfolding and coherent network of cross-reference.

On its French publication in early 1961, Maurice Nadeau published an enthusiastic
review in
L’Express
(26 January). A long-time supporter of Beckett, Nadeau had been closely involved
in the first Paris production of
En
attendant
Godot
and was to be influential in securing the Nobel Prize for Beckett in 1969. He begins
his review by expressing surprise at the further reduction of circumstance in the
novelist’s fictional world, having regarded
The
Unnamable
as reaching the limit in this regard. He offers a lucid interpretation of the novel
as allegory and notes that it contains ‘visions of incredible precision’. The novelist
Claude Mauriac took an opposite stance
(
Figaro
, 1 February). Though the work contains flashes of beauty, it is for the most part
unreadable, not for its unpunctuated form or morbid content (by then familiar ground),
but because Beckett’s words negate not only themselves but ourselves: they efface
us from the world. Subsequent reviews by the Paris
cognoscenti
reflected this polarity, frequently within the same review. Guy Dumur (
France
Observateur,
16 February 1961) speaks of a style that is beautiful despite its contempt for style,
and of the intimidating applications of Beckett’s impressive talents. R.-M. Albérès
(
Nouvelles
littéraires,
2 March 1961) likens
Comment
c’est
to the Book of Job and to the works of Pascal for the lyricism of its despair, but
wonders if the novel breaks new ground or is a mere imitation of Kafka crossed with
the poetic prose of Lautréamont. Charles Camproux’s long review (
Lettres
françaises,
11 May 1961) contrasts the apparent incoherence of the novel’s form and the profound
coherence of its vision.

The English-language press also took note of the French
Comment
c’est.
Writing in the
French
Review
(May 1961), Raymond Federman shares the general amazement at the further foreshortening
of circumstance in Beckett’s fictional world, and echoes the contradiction between
its ‘nihilism’ and its audacious artistry. The
Times
Literary
Supplement
(7 April 1961) was generally receptive: Beckett’s ‘range is limited; it is a vertical
range through the layers of human consciousness rather than a horizontal extension
through those forms of behaviour
and experience […]. But it is entirely his own territory and he has explored it with
great skill and thoroughness. As for the despair:
Comment
c’est
may not be a great novel but it is a work which makes most postwar novels look trivial.’

When Beckett’s English version appeared,, three years later, V. S. Pritchett began
his review in the
New
Statesman
(1 May 1964) with a parody of the novel’s style, and went on to suggest that Beckett’s
writing had paid ‘a heavy price in obscurity, pretentiousness and awful boredom’.
He notes nonetheless that there are ‘lyrical glints’ in the text and ends by drawing
a not-unflattering parallel with Shaw and the tradition of Irish farce. The
Times Literary Supplement
’s review of
How It Is
(21 May 1964) offers an objective summary of the novel’s progress, ending with the
usual contrast between pessimism of content and ‘poetic energy’ of rendering.