All to end (the year)

One clear memory I have of David Lodge's review of The Book of God is that he described its author as being "a novelist deeply influenced by Beckett". It stuck in my mind because, at the time, in my very early days of reading books, I wondered how on earth a novelist could be influenced by such an author; it was, I thought, like being influenced by a field or a cloud. This was 1988. In March 1989, Beckett published Stirrings Still and I began to appreciate what it might mean. Later that year, thirty years ago today, Beckett died (I saw the news on Ceefax). So, as with my post on the thirtieth anniversary of Bernhard's death earlier this year, here are a few links to what I've written about Beckett on this blog.

However, the first thing I ever wrote for the internet was a review not for this blog but for Spike Magazine of the two biographies of Beckett published that year, and though I am reluctant to hyperlink (empathising with Beckett for his own reluctance to allow early work to be reprinted), I do so because the first line prefigures a theme in what I've written ever since: that it has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture in the way his mentor Joyce has been assimilated. The reason can be explained via a post from 2008 in which I quote Beckett explaining why his work changed at the time of Molloy following what he calls a revelation:

I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness.

Such an understanding remains alien to English-language literary culture. Popular book discussion still promotes writing that offers knowledge: Ten books you need to read. Imagine being told you need to read the authors who Beckett admired for the flame that burns away filthy logic.

This year I discovered that the book in which Beckett said this was published without Beckett's approval; he thought the conversations were private. But it does include his important refutation of the label 'theatre of the absurd' for his plays. He was also filmed without his knowledge talking about a television play, perhaps the only time he ever spoke on film.

The longest posts on Beckett appeared in 2011, on his silence and on the second volume of letters. 

But going back to Stirrings Still: ten years ago, I wrote about its initial publication in Oh all to publish, a post that includes a photograph of the full text as it appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Around the same time BBC Radio 3 broadcast a reading by Barry McGovern, which I recorded on a C90 cassette at the time and whose words – such and much more – still echo in my mind. Here it is, digitised in three parts.