BECKETT, Samuel. How It Is. London: John Calder. 1964.
8vo. Original full fawn morocco, lettered and lined in gilt to spine, printed on handmade paper, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, publisher’s fawn paper slipcase; pp. 160; spine a touch faded, pages predominantly uncut, slipcase with a few surface marks and marginal fading; a crisp, very near fine copy.
One of 100 numbered copies signed by Samuel Beckett, hors commerce, bound in full morocco and printed on handmade paper (Series B); this is copy no. 8.
How It Is, translated by the author, was issued three years after its original French counterpart, Comment C’est. In three parts, a précis of which is given in the work’s first words – “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it” – the work unfolds as a series of short, unpunctuated “paragraphs” (they are not paragraphs any more than the work is what we think of as a novel). The unnamed narrator, lying in dark and mud, relates what he hears (or remembers) uttered by another voice, of the story, obliquely, of a life (his life?), and predicament before, during, and after the pivotal encounter with Pim (though we can’t be sure about any of this).
Beckett began writing the work in December 1958 while staying at his country retreat, a small house near the village of Ussy-sur-Marne, sixty kilometres away from his Paris apartment. Édouard Magessa O'Reilly (the work’s most recent editor) notes that early drafts contain references to the details of the author’s daily life, to the moles, for example, tearing up his plant beds and mentioned in his letters from this time. Such quotidian details, however, are strategically excised from the finished text. Abstract and enigmatic, the work, however, is explicit in its descriptions of violence and cruelty; the precision of its unpunctuated yet measured prose rendering the graphic descriptions of mutilation even more disturbing. Certainly the bleakest, and among the most “difficult”, of Beckett’s works, it is one of the great prose works of the last century.
In addition to the morocco edition of 100 copies (B1-100), 100 copies were issued in vellum (signed and numbered A1-100). The UK trade edition was published by John Calder on April 30th, 1964, in an edition of 4000 copies.
See How It Is, edited by Édouard Magessa O'Reilly (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).
Federman and Fletcher 384.101
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