How It Is

How It Is is a novel by Samuel Beckett first published in French as Comment c'est by Les Editions de Minuit in 1961. The Grove Press (New York) published Beckett's English translation in 1964. An advance text of his English translation of the third part appeared in the 1962 issue of the Australian literary journal, Arna.^[1]

L'Image, an early variant version of Comment c'est, was published in the British arts review, X: A Quarterly Review (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form.^[2]

Beckett had a particularly difficult time composing How It Is (then referred to as Pim), writing in an April 1960 letter: “I have only a rough (though 4th or 5th) version in French and am not at all sure I can bring it any further. If I can’t, I’ll throw it away.”^[3] While the notebooks containing these rough drafts have not yet been made publicly available through the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, it's been noted that they're filled with heavy revisions and key structural elements of the text didn't emerge until late in the composition process.^[4]

The novel is a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through endless mud, recalling his life separated into three periods. The title is Beckett's literal translation of the French phrase, comment c'est (how it is), a pun on the French verb commencer or 'to begin'.

^ Beckett, Samuel, How it is. Extract from Comment c'est, translated from the French by the author, in Arna 1962, Faculty of Arts Society, University of Sydney
^ “L’Image”, X: A Quarterly Review, ed. David Wright & Patrick Swift, Vol. I, No. 1, November 1959 Beckett Exhibition Harry Ransom Centre University of Texas at Austin
^ Beckett, Samuel (2014). The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-1965. Cambridge University Press. p. 327. ISBN 978-0521867955.
^ Cohn, Ruby (2001). A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 250–256. ISBN 9780472111909.

[1] Beckett, Samuel, How it is. Extract from Comment c'est, translated from the French by the author, in Arna 1962, Faculty of Arts Society, University of Sydney

[2] “L’Image”, X: A Quarterly Review, ed. David Wright & Patrick Swift, Vol. I, No. 1, November 1959 Beckett Exhibition Harry Ransom Centre University of Texas at Austin

[3] Beckett, Samuel (2014). The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-1965. Cambridge University Press. p. 327. ISBN 978-0521867955.

[4] Cohn, Ruby (2001). A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 250–256. ISBN 9780472111909.

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