A book
that changed
me
Samuel Beckett's moving work taught me little French but much about love
During a lonely summer in a Loire tourist office, How It Is conjured up the most wry descriptions of human capacity
Nina Power
Thuesday 8 August 2013
Is it then a "love story"? A very strange one, perhaps, and between who or what or why is a tricky question (but then again, is there a "why" when it comes to love?). A faint voice, and a faint "he": "having rummaged in the mud between his legs I bring up finally what seems to me a testicle or two the anatomy I had". Although the relationship between the narrator and "Pim" is alternately masochistic and sadistic, and very muddy, there are moments of sublime tenderness: "in the dark the mud my head against his my side glued to his my right arm round his shoulders his cries have ceased we lie thus a good moment they are good moments".
THE GUARDIAN
N
ot a single punctuation mark breaks the relentlessness of the text, yet the prose is anything but flowing. Gasps of minimal communication, oblique memories and brittle reflections on love rise up from some sort of mire, snatches of a monologue broken by the mud that engulfs the narrator, allowing only the briefest flurry of words before sinking back down again. Samuel Beckett's text sounds austere, bleak and difficult, and his prose work in general is less celebrated than the plays. But How It Is is moving in its minimalism and, in a strange way, the best description of love I've ever encountered (bar the real-life story of Nadine Vaujour, who learned how to fly a helicopter so she could – successfully – break her husband out of jail).
I first read How It Is while working a summer job (for €30 a week, if I recall correctly) at a French tourist office in a very small town in the Loire valley. It happened to be fairly near a town named Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, a linguistic coincidence that caused occasional confusion among tourists thinking they had stumbled on the place where the far more famous wine whose name also begins with "Châteauneuf" was made.
While a large part of my duties involved trying to flog only slightly inferior local wine to these visitors, I also had plenty of time to sit about and read, and try to improve my French, which I was convinced would mean that the secrets of philosophy would open themselves up to me, like an oyster revealing a pearl. Of course, I forgot that a pearl is really just the product of irritation, and besides, the oyster dies when you open it.
Knowing that Beckett had begun writing in French because he wanted to write "without style", I optimistically decided that reading Beckett's French texts alongside the English translations, almost all of which were translated by Beckett himself, would be an entertaining way of learning the language, an endeavour that quickly proved rather more difficult than it seemed, not least because Beckett's self-translations are deliberately non-literal in the main, making side-by-side comparison amusing but not always particularly pedagogically useful. So I just read them separately instead (I would say I started with the French versions, but that would be a lie). The English version of How It Is, published in 1964 (the French Comment C'est was published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1961) begins: "how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it". The tripartite text that follows recounts in a strange, bleak but wry way the broken thoughts, memories, the time before the encounter with "Pim" and the time afterwards.
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| Samuel Beckett Mathieu Luca |
Patrick Bixby has suggested that there are parallels between Beckett's vision of sexual sameness and the "Black Diaries" of the colonialist-turned-anti-imperialist Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, which Beckett was reading around this time. But, as Bixby suggests, Beckett's text cannot easily be read as a simple reflection on Casement's political reports or sexual confessions – yet there are allusions throughout not only to the violence of Belgian and British imperialism documented by Casement in the early 20th century but also to the image of a love or a sexuality predicated on a curious kind of "sameness": "glued together like a single body in the dark the mud", as the narrator puts it.
The stark, minimal world of How It Is – the mud, the single sack of food, the violent encounters in the dark – is occasionally tempered by moments of sublime beauty and reminiscence: "blue and white of sky a moment still April morning in the mud it's over it's done I've had the image the scene". The uncertain space between prose and poetry, between self-love and love of another – all this brings me back to this rather lonely summer and to questions I still don't have the answers to. I've read How It Is more times than any other novel, if indeed that term applies here. It created and continues to create the most vivid sadnesses and joys, but also conjures up the most wry descriptions of existence, of love and of human capacity: "in any case we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary".
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