Worstward Ho

"This is a tiny book – it is only about 40 pages and it has got these massive white margins and really large type. I haven’t counted, but I would guess it is only about two to three thousand words and it is dressed up as a novella when it is really only a short story. On the first page there is this riff: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When I read this I thought I had discovered a slogan for the classroom that I could share with my students. I want to encourage them to make mistakes and not to be perfectionists, not to feel that everything they do has to be of publishable standard. The whole point of doing a course, especially a creative writing MA and attending workshops, is that you can treat the course as a sandpit. You go in there, you try things out which otherwise you wouldn’t try, and then you submit it to the scrutiny of your classmates and you get feedback. Inevitably there will be things that don’t work and your classmates will help you to identify those so that you can take it away and redraft it – you can try again. And inevitably you are going to fail again because any artistic endeavour is doomed to failure because the achievement can never match the ambition. That’s why artists keep producing their art and writers keep writing, because the thing you did last just didn’t quite satisfy you, just wasn’t quite right. And you keep going and trying to improve on that. I have a really good quote from Joseph Conrad in which he says the sitting down is all. He spends eight hours at his desk, trying to write, failing to write, foaming at the mouth, and in the end wanting to hit his head on the wall but refraining from that for fear of alarming his wife! It’s a familiar situation; lots of writers will have been there. For me it is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is something I have to keep returning to. I have to keep going back to the sentences, trying to get them right. Trying to line them up correctly. I can’t let them go. It is endlessly frustrating because they are never quite right. Reasonably happy. Once they are done and gone I can relax and feel a little bit proud of them. But at the time I just experience agonies. It takes me ages. It takes me four or five years to finish a novel partly because I always find distractions – like working in academia – something that will keep me away from the writing, which is equally as unrewarding as it is rewarding!"

"I hesitated about putting this one down because it refuses to be summarised. He started writing it in 1981 when he was seventy-five and it forms the last part of what we call the ‘ Nohow On Trilogy ’, the second trilogy. It’s a remarkable book because it really does take language to the opposite extreme of what Joyce did in Finnegans Wake , which was exuberant in its linguistic playfulness. Worstward Ho is comprised of the building blocks of language. There are very few multisyllabic words in the piece. What Beckett’s doing is taking, as it were, very brief words and adding mainly negative prefixes to them. So, he takes the word “how” and puts the word “no” in front of it to create “nohow”; he’s playing with the word “on” and its reversal “no”. It’s a work that shuns adjectives. It’s a work that shuns plot. It’s a work that tries to replicate the act of the imagination. It’s a narrative voice that has no location and has no origin, in many ways, constructing or reconstructing images. “It’s a work that shuns adjectives. It’s a work that shuns plot. It’s a work that tries to replicate the act of the imagination.” Whether these images are found in memory or whether they are acts of imagination is never quite clear. But the images are always very unclearly perceived. It’s playing around with the idea of the ill-seen and the ill-said. The text is, in many ways, trying to annihilate itself. It’s trying to find the worst. But as we’re now aware, one of the germs of the text comes from the famous passage in King Lear where it’s said: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” He notes that line in a notebook shortly before starting writing Worstward Ho . It clearly intrigues him. In many ways, the text tries to worsen itself all the way through until we get to the end where everything that gets said gets unsaid as well. It’s probably Beckett at his most minimal. But, at the same, it’s strangely poetic. It teaches you to read differently. The opening two pages show you how to read the text until you get into the flow of things. The origin of this style of writing is with How It Is (1960) which is the beginning of the late work. With How It Is , Beckett radically rewrites or disuses syntax, and I think Worstward Ho is the culmination of that process. It is a harsh work, it is a minimal work, it is a bare work, but at the same time it’s oddly rich and rewarding because of that. I’ve read this text so many times and I still cannot explain how that works: how that diminishing trajectory somehow results in abundance. It’s like what Moran in Molloy says about the dance of the bees: “Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.” It’s that sort of problem. Later on, Beckett is obviously aware of that, but when he’s writing Watt he clearly has no audience in mind. He’s writing for himself; he’s passing his time. By that point, whether he’s ever going to be able to publish it or whether he’s going to publish again is completely up in the air. Beckett needed to express himself to a certain degree. I wouldn’t say that the fact that we have become witness to what he needed to express is secondary , but it’s not necessarily something that he always had at the forefront of his mind. Going back to the word “experiment” you just used, I think that Beckett remained experimental throughout his life. One thing we haven’t mentioned yet is just how experimental he was, unlike most artists, across such a wide variety and range of media. He was one of the first to really experiment with radio plays, so much so that the BBC set up its radiophonic studio. We also neglect the fact that he wrote a film. We also need to remember that he’s one of the first to really experiment with TV. We even have an abandoned manuscript here in Reading where we see that he’s thinking about a very early piece of video art. Beckett was always looking for new ways to say whatever it is exactly that he’s trying to say. He’s experimental all the way through. Every text somehow pushes that barrier further and further. Yes, sometimes they take a step backwards. I think Krapp’s Last Tape to a certain degree in terms of its technicality, its form, is a step backwards. And a short prose like ‘Enough’ is not as radical as the prose pieces that he’d done before. Company , also, revisits certain things that he’d done before. But there’s always this drive to find a new way to say what he’s trying to say. I think the urge to be experimental never diminishes. That is one of the reasons that we consider him one of the most important writers of the 20th century, precisely because of that. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” That’s always going to be a rather difficult one to pass by. There’s also a passage in ‘Enough’: “What do I know of man’s destiny? I know more about radishes.” I always loved that one. There’s also the very famous pot scene in Watt where he talks about Watt’s struggle to feel happy. As he says, “it resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted.” That is probably my favourite."