39 Books: 2002

The quiet joy of short, constrained memoirs. I borrowed a copy of this book in 2002 and then found a copy in a remaindered shop for £5.

Anne Atik got to know Beckett in the late 1950s through the artist Avigdor Arikha, later her husband. Beckett's circle of friends included as many painters as writers. On their nights drinking on the Boulevard Montparnasse, the trio would try to avoid Giacometti because he repeated the same anecdote much too often. Beckett’s visual memory was striking, we’re told that "he remembered paintings of Old Masters … their composition and colour, the impact each one had had". The German Diaries arriving in September will no doubt confirm this.

But it was poetry that sustained their friendship. Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, Arikha and Beckett could recite reams of verse, generally in the original language: Yeats (usually 'The Tower'), Shakespeare, Goethe, Hölderlin, the Psalms ('the greatest poems in the world'), Dante, and many others. When the drinking was over and Beckett visited the couple’s flat of an evening, they’d listen to music and discuss writers. They would swap books. A page of Beckett’s copy of Le Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca is reprinted to show the first owner’s annotation. Descriptions of his recitations indicate how much the poetry meant to him:

Sam did not dissect, define, analyse, deconstruct or elaborate on why he found a poem great. […] His impressions or reactions came through his body, […] he’d raise a hand or look at you intensely; or lift or lower his head when repeating the lines.

How It Was consists mostly of notes made after these special evenings with reflections. Anne Atik daren’t have made notes in his presence; it wasn’t that Beckett was irascible, she says, just that she respected him too much. Sometimes, however, there was nothing to note. He’d sit for hours without saying a word: "sinking into his private world with its demons, or so we imagined."

The large format of the book allows close-up study of letters and manuscripts by Beckett, as well as moving sketch portraits by Arikha. Beckett’s other life, the one upon which the couple didn’t intrude, appears only in reprints of postcards sent from abroad when he’s working on the production of a play, or from Tangiers escaping attention. The limited perspective allows us to enjoy Beckett’s company as he reads and talks about books: he thought Kafka’s prose "Hochdeutsch" when his subject "called for a more disjointed style". He didn’t like Rilke very much. He didn’t like Pound because he had been rude to him as a young writer. He thought Saul Bellow’s Herzog was "excellent" and loved Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson so much that begged to be allowed to keep Atik’s copy. More than once we’re told he thought King Lear couldn’t be staged and that he almost wrote a play based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71. He couldn’t get on with Bach or Jane Austen. It goes on.

Atik speculates that the certainties underpinning the worlds of Bach and Austen contribute to Beckett’s distaste. The work for them was too easy. Finding the form was all important. It shouldn’t be a given. From December 1977:

All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence. Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived for a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions. So one finds oneself going back to vielles competénces – how to escape that. [sic] One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.

Later he concludes (without concluding):

The logical thing to do would be to look out of the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc. But one can’t get over one’s dream.