BECKETT, Samuel. How It Is. London: John Calder. 1964.
8vo. Original light grey cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket designed by John Sewell, priced 30s. to the front flap; pp. 160; a little pushed to spine tips, wrapper with minor rubbing and light wear to extremities and a few light surface marks, small closed tear (c.0.5 cm) to upper edge of rear panel; a near fine copy, the pages bright and without spotting, in a near fine jacket.
A smart first UK edition of one of the greatest, and the bleakest, of Beckett's prose works.
How It Is, translated by the author, was issued three years after the original French Comment C’est. In three parts, a précis of which appears in the opening 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 novel unfolds in a series of short, unpunctuated ‘paragraphs’ (they are not paragraphs any more than the work is what we usually think of as a novel). The unnamed narrator, lying in dark and mud, relates what he hears (or remembers) of a different voice: a 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 How It Is in December 1958, while staying at his country retreat, a small house near the village of Ussy-sur-Marne, sixty kilometres from Paris. Édouard Magessa O'Reilly (the work’s most recent editor) notes that early drafts include 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 detail was strategically excised from the finished text. Abstract and enigmatic, the work is nevertheless unflinching in its account of violence and cruelty; the unpunctuated yet measured prose rendering its 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. This UK trade edition was published by John Calder on April 30th, 1964, in an edition of 4000 copies.
Federman and Fletcher 384.1
SKU: 2125289