Backlisted - Plays, Books and Stories: Samuel Beckett

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

In this episode, we feature the life and work of Samuel Beckett, one of the most important and influential voices of 20th century literature. We discuss Beckett’s writing across five decades, including his essays, short stories, novels and plays: ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce’; ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’; ‘The Unnamable’; Krapp’s Last Tape’; and the late masterpiece ‘Company’. And we also ruminate on the fact that Backlisted has now been going on (it must go on, it can’t go on, it’ll go on) for eight years, notching up nearly 200 episodes. We hope you enjoy this memorable and moving recording AKA Spool #199. John, Andy and Nicky * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. you must go on i can't go on you must go on. I can't go on.

You must go on. I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they see me. Strange pain, strange sin. You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have set me already.

Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story. Before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me. If it opens, it would be i it would be the silence where i am i don't know i'll never know in the silence you don't know you must go on i can't go on i'll go on well who knew harold pinter would launch his own podcast in the future everyone will be a mouth talking in the void i can't go on i'll go on hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast which gives new life to old books today you find me in the dark

i can't move i'm curled up inside some kind of jar dim intermittent light people pass before me at least i think they do i can hear my own voice if it is my own voice in the silence. If it is silence, all I can do is go on. But I can't go on. I must go on. I'll go on. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. I feel like you've desecrated something there. Well done. I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm Nikki Birch, and I'm the editor of Backlisted. Hooray! And today's episode, which is our 199th, is dedicated entirely to the work of one writer, and if you haven't already guessed, his name was Samuel Beckett.

There are no guests this time, but over the course of the next hour, the three of us will discuss, read from, and listen to five of Beckett's works that we feel give a representative sweep of his long career. And rather as we did with our episode on Graham Greene, we'll cover some of Beckett's writing that isn't as well known and some of his writing that is extremely famous. and some of his writing that is extremely famous. Sean, when, where, how, why did you first encounter the writing of Samuel Beckett? I was, I think I was actually 15, 16, a teenager in New Zealand at a school in Auckland, and I went to a brilliant production of Perhaps Last Tape and Not I

at a small theatre company. You know, you have those moments in the theatre that completely transform the way you think about what's possible. Crap, obviously, one man and a tape machine. We're going to talk about Crap later on. Not I, a mouth, an illuminated mouth in the middle of a stage, a tape machine. We're going to be talking about that later on. Not I, a mouth, an illuminated mouth in the middle of a stage, a monologue.

And I suppose after that, I was kind of, yeah, I was hooked. And I read as much about and by Beckett as I could. As we'll discover, some of that is quite difficult. Some of it is also incredibly powerful, moving and funny. So as in our Graham Greene episode, we have divided the roles the three of us will play, like a Beckett play.

So John is the talking head in the dark. The expert. The expert. Oh, Lord, yes. I am someone who has read the hits, such as Waiting for Godot and Crapsaw's Ta Table, which I love, and The Unnameable, which we'll be talking about in a bit. And Nikki, how would you describe your role today?

So honestly, if someone has used the phrase, that's very Bikettian, I have no idea what that means. Now, prior to doing this, obviously my extensive research for this episode, but I have no idea what that means. Uh-huh. Now. Prior to doing this, obviously my extensive research for this episode, but I have seen one Beckett play back in 1991. I saw Rick Mayle and Adrian Edmondson

doing Waiting for Godot. Oh, nice though. Nice. Well, we must discuss that because I saw Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart doing A Way to the Godot. Wow. And I'm sure John has seen many.

I think one of the things about Beckett is that it's such an incredible, the 20th century alone, the performances of Godot and the great plays, some of the greatest actors, obviously. So there's a lot to choose from. And we've got some nice clips as well to play. Because this is episode 199,

and it's just the three of us. Before we get on to Samuel Beckett, Beckett is coming in, I reckon, about five to ten minutes' time. This is the first time the three of us have been in a room together for six months. And we used to get together all the time didn't we and then and then the pandemic happened and we just we're like a band in the

late stages of its career where one of them moves to america and has to fly in for rehearsals that's you that's me yeah right so um we wanted to talk a little bit first about how it feels after eight years to have made 200 episodes of this podcast and john has chosen five magnificent examples of beckett's work five texts and i have laboriously worked out how each one of them connects to a different moment in backlisted history. So if you'll indulge us as we indulge ourselves a bit. John, I was thinking about on the way down here today, what would you have done with the last

eight years if you hadn't been making this? Less reading. Yeah. And how? Fewer books, I'm sure. In fact, I genuinely think it's completely changed the way I look at the history of literature now. I feel like I've had a massive kind of blood transfusion, you know, and I've ended up with a different perspective on not just on writing, but on the way, the kind of the canon, the whole relationship between a writer's work and their life. It's been one of the most formative, important experiences of my life.

I feel exactly the same way. I mean, I feel like listeners have been terribly patient as they heard us learn on the job, not just how to make the shows but actually when i consider some of the subjects authors or books that we've taken on we had that kind of fearlessness that came from we didn't know what we were doing we didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for the fact we feel confident enough to sit here and have a three-way discussion of samuel beckett which i can't believe i'm involved well that's all part of the fun of it right that's the energy of

it so i john i feel the impact on my reading how i read the way i read has been changed forever by doing backlisted but my experience over the last year or so is also that he's changed the way I write completely. In what way? I feel the benefit of having read approximately a thousand and a half books in the time we've been doing this podcast. It's not really that difficult. If you read week in, week out, some of the greatest exponents of the written word, you pick up a few tips. Yeah, that's a really good point.

I mean, I think it seeps into your sense of pace and tone. And no doubt, I feel I'm a much better writer than I was eight years ago. Nikki, though, right? You joined us how many years in? I'm like the Ronnie Wood.

I was just thinking, yeah. I was just thinking in so many ways, in so many ways. Did you join us after three years in? Yes. You've been with us five years. How has this changed your life or hasn't it? I don't know. I think it has. Actually, my partner was laughing at me last week saying, I can't believe you're watching Krat's last take in the bath. That's a transformation. No, but I mean, in all seriousness,

I was a reader as a child and a teenager and I stopped reading. Stopped not kind of completely, but nowhere near the amount of pleasure I get out of it now. So transformational in that. But also, I now will approach books that I never would because I want to be part of the conversational backlisted.

I also have very much you in my mind, Andy, which is finish the book. No, but it really helps. And so sometimes it's a struggle, but I will always finish the book. And I really enjoy that. Do you know what I mean? And I will plow through book and I really I really enjoy that do you know what I mean and I will plow through books that I find difficult and I also you know

and I approach it and I know sometimes I find it easier to listen because that's sometimes certain books are easier listening but it's completely changed what I read and it's completely changed

my ability to talk about things I wouldn't have had the confidence to talk about them either that is really interesting one of my yeah one of the other things I feel that I have had confirmed by the experience of being involved with Batlisted is I can remember,

I'm sure I've said this on the podcast before, but I can remember Salman Rushdie saying once, you know, you have to get out of this trap of thinking the world is full of bad books that have been written to waste your time it's just not true that there are very few great books and there are very few really bad books and there are an awful lot of good books books that if you read them with an open mind you'll take something something away from. And that is one of the beautiful things about this, isn't it? That there are books that you guys have talked about on this show,

which maybe we'll come on to in a quiz later in this show to sort of showcase some of those old books. But that you have perhaps not always liked retrospectively, but you have found something in all of them so that has value and you've been positive and really made people feel like this is the great thing about this book. Yeah.

You know, and I think that's so, it's the passion and energy and enthusiasm you both share for books. John, don't you, I think one of the misconceptions about Backlisted is that we're here to sell books. I mean, we are, we like selling books, especially through thebookshop.org, because that helps us keep going.

But we were doing an interview last week, and we were talking about on that, weren't we, with Eric? We were saying on that, I know it's a good show when I get to the end and think, brilliant, people who hear this are going to read this book. Not buy this book. Read it. Not buy this book. Not buy this book.

Read this book. And I think that process of us, it's an amazing thing to have to get your thoughts into some kind of order and to communicate those, hopefully, kind of cogently. That's not how a lot of people read. It's not how I read. I used to do that, I suppose, when I was a student.

But unless you're reviewing a book, you read and you go on to the next one. But what I've really welcomed is that added layer of trying to think about how you communicate what you've read, what the impact the book has had on you, why it might be of interest to other people. And I think that, in a way, I almost feel that is habit forming. I read, as you say, differently and I write differently. But I also think differently now. When I'm reading a book, I think I'm also at the same time wondering what I'm going to say about it.

Well, you know, let's make 200 more of these I suppose we're never going to run out I'll go on I can't go on but it is thanks to people listening isn't it that we've carried on and therefore we've got this great benefit of being able to

read and enjoy all these books amazing group of listeners people listen to this I thought this was just for fun. It's such a, you know, the patron community, they're incredible people. It's very reassuring. Very, very, very positive.

Before we move on to the main event, I want you to think for a moment. I will go first to give you some thinking time. Which one book, doesn't have to be the subject of an episode, which one book that you wouldn't have read if it wasn't for doing this, is the book you will take away?

When you think about Baptist, what is the book you think of? What's the book that springs to mind shall i go first go on i don't think i would have read i mean there are books that i've enjoyed more but i don't think i would have read something happened by joseph heller which i can still feel in the pit of my stomach, the excitement of thinking that that book is still on the shelves of bookshops, as I said in the show at the time. And I can remember, was it, I think you, John,

reading something from it near the end of the recording, and there being an almost hysterical sense of how transgressive it was how funny how brilliant and how alive how alive what an extraordinary thing a book is when it when it lifts up off the page like that so i think something happened by joseph heller is probably mine even though there are books that I like more, enjoyed more, got more out of it. I don't know. It's just that that's the lightning struck for me there.

That is, I mean, it's a very tricky question to say. I mean, there are so many that I could, you know, off the top of my head. You've got to choose one. Yeah, I know. I know I've got to choose one. I will choose one. I think.

Is it lightning rods it was lightning rods no further questions I I think that now I probably

I've got to choose one and I've got to make it you know what I think this is actually I think hilarious to watch one and I've got to make it. You know what? I think... This is actually hilarious to watch. I think Hoistmans. I think Arabor. I don't think I'd have ever read that book if we hadn't done it.

And now it's a book that I think about. I probably think about that book once a week. Against Nature by Hoistmans. And it was... That was a lovely episode. I mean, maybe there was a bit of that, that we were doing it in,

in, in Shakespeare and Company in Paris, but, you know, I've read a lot. I've been turned on to, you know, lots of amazing women writers through that list.

But that, that, that one book, I mean, I can remember reading it and thinking, I can't believe I've not, not only have I not read it, but I didn't know it was this good

and this transgressive and this odd and mad. Nikki. I have got two. Sorry. Ah, well, go on then. Okay. Because they both relate to me, they're ones I think about a lot.

Maybe again, not the best books are the ones, but I, so I also, I work at the BBC. And so the human voices one by penelope fitzgerald which is all about the bbc during the war i think about that a lot at work does it still seem in what way do you get do you go to work and think the sort of fictional characters flit along the corridors i think about mostly them sleeping there during the bombing raids and that's sort of you know i kind of think what was that like and i just imagine and and one of the characters dies in a bomb you know around the corner and i can picture the street where it happened and that just it just

feels very kind of connected to me and then the second one which also feels connected to me is full tilt um by dervla murphy which is the cycling right okay because i cycle quite a lot but also the fact that she was just such this incredible machine she was an absolute legend and I think about how she managed that

and I sort of aspire to be a small amount of a cycling legend as she is I aspire to her method of having her phone on

for what was it on a Wednesday morning at 5am and that was it the rest of the time you couldn't get hold of them, which meant she could write instead. I don't think I would have read either of those books had it been not for Backlisted.

So that, I think I'm more likely to pick up a book from the table at Waterstones. That would have been my kind of reading before Backlisted. And so now I'm, you know, I feel like I've got to the point where I'm reading books that actually connected me on a much greater level, thanks to you both. That's great.

So how we're going to run this is, John has chosen five books, plays, novels, collections of short stories, texts by Samuel Beckett for us. And he's going to announce for us each one. And then I am going to offer my interpretation of why he has chosen that book in relation to the history of Batlisted. So the first in our Beckett series is an early essay, 1929. It appeared in a book that was dedicated to what was then known as work in progress. that was dedicated to what was then known as work in progress.

So it was called Our Exagermination Around His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. By? By, the work in progress was by James Joyce and it was the book that became Finnegan's Wake. And it was published, this book was published by Shakespeare and Company. They used to call it Our Exag. And the first essay in it was an essay by a precocious young writer called Samuel Beckett,

Dante Bruno Vico Joyce. Right. Now, you've already mentioned one way that that ties in back into Batlist, which is called Shakespeare and Company, bookshop in Paris. But also, I would go so far as to suggest, John, that you chose that because on episodes three and four of Backlisted,

in the now defunct of what I've been reading this week slot, eight years ago, I was reading, about now in fact, I was reading Finnegan's Wake. You were. Yeah, all, however many pages it is. But you can hear me, you can go back into the archive at backlisted.fm and hear me talking about the experience of both reading and finishing Finnegan's Wake in episodes three and four devoted to David Nobbs

and Nancy Mitford respectively. And I also will go so far as to suggest the reason why John has chosen Beckett's essay on Finnegan's Wake

by James Joyce is because several times over the years on Backlisted we have announced an episode on James Joyce and Ulysses

that has repeatedly failed to materialise and that is a clear reference by John to Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for God Very good Very good Andy Gold star there

I think that's brilliant The reason I chose it is that the one thing I guess that people, if they know anything about Beckett, is that he worked as Joyce's secretary. He went to Paris. He was an A-grade student. I mean, he got a gold medal for modern languages from Trinity College Dublin and went to teach in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris as teaching English.

This is in his 20s so absolutely and he was introduced by the predecessor in his job a guy called Thomas McGreevy

who introduced him to Joyce Joyce got on extremely well with Beckett and used him as a secretary and two things

came out of that one that Joyce's daughter Lucia fell in love with Beckett and that was sort of unrequited

which is problematic and she later that's a whole other story, ended up in a mental institution. But Beckett was heavily influenced by Joyce and this group of essays was the first attempt critically to try and explain and defend Finnegan's Wake. So we should say at this point that Beckett as a pupil of Joyce,

as Joyce's amanuensis and pupil. What's amanuensis? Sort of secretary, taking notes, doing research. Right. James Joyce's intern. Yeah, yeah, intern. Executive assistant. Yeah, yeah, it's okay.

Well, we should say that Beckett was thought to be a precociously talented as a reader and writer. He was perceived as someone who was going to do great things. And his contemporaries and some of the older people around him felt, as it happened, when it happened, that the worst thing he ever did was fall under the influence of James Joyce. Really fascinating. Because Joyce then perhaps is not the Joyce we think of now. We struggle perhaps to understand Portions of Finnegan's Wake nearly 100 years after it was composed. Imagine at the time when it was being published in literary journals,

imagine how offensively avant-garde it must have seemed to so many of its readers. And I love this essay, John. I've never read this essay before. Almost because of the aggression in it. Absolutely. essay before, almost because of the aggression in it. Absolutely. Beckett's passionate advocacy, not for, you know, the more respectable things that people hoped he would recommend and talk about and discuss, but really leaning into the idea

that you need to pay attention to what this man, James Joyce, is doing. And he was was you know star student his parents wanted him to be an academic his his dad was a quantity so the very upper middle class dublin family came from a lived in a beautiful house um so there was a lot of expectation he wasn't like joyce he didn't come he didn't come from that sort of working class background you talk about the combative thing. He goes in very early to say, must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeonhole and modify the dimensions of that pigeonhole

for the satisfaction of the analogy mongers? Literary criticism is not bookkeeping. Literary criticism is not bookkeeping. That should be the backlisted motto. We should go from here. We should put that on the t-shirt for our merch. Well, let's go from here and all get it tattooed. And I i mean without going into all the details of this so the other stuff he writes about which is that the the vico the great uh 17th 17th century italian philosopher who had the

idea of cycles of history were were all interconnected and repeating one another he uses that to try and explain the schema of what joyce is doing but there are little bits of the jet packet to come he says when he's once he's explained the vico theory he said so much for the dry bones the consciousness that there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian and a great deal of both in the man at the apogee of his life's curve removes all the stiff inter-exclusiveness that is often the danger in neat construction so you're beginning to see your crap sauce very much very much there and then he's he's amazing about the language in the book and this is what he says about readers for

the book which is this is the bit that i think you respond to as well on turning to the work in progress we find the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct, in comparison to Vico, here is direct expression, pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, ladies and gentlemen, it's because you're too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what we may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill

no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quarterly conditional reflex of dribbling comprehension. Anyway, the point is he's saying that Joyce's language is a lie. This is the real thing. He says, he does this brilliant thing where he says, lex, a crop of acorns, ilex, tree that produces acorns, legere, to gather,

aquilex, he that gathers the waters, lex, gathering together of peoples, public assembly, lex, law, law ledger to gather together letters into a word to read so you go from an acorn to reading and that's he's saying that's that's that's what joyce is doing he's taking language back to its roots um and he says here form is content content is form you complain that this stuff is not written in english it is not written at all it is not to be read or rather it is not only to be read it is to be looked at and listened

to his writing is not about something it is that something itself a fact that has been grasped by an eminent novelist and historian whose work is in complete opposition to mr joyce's when the sense is sleep the words go to sleep when the sense is dancing the words dance mr joyce's de-sophisticated language and it's worthwhile remarking that no language is so sophisticated as english it is abstracted to death it's a great punchy little essay in defense of finnegan's wake but you're also beginning to see within it, one, Becker isn't going to be an academic. He's just,

he can't, he doesn't want to play that game. And two, this interesting idea of things being recycled and old age and youth. Well,

I'll tell you what it reminded me of. It reminded me of, Nick, you're going to be surprised by me saying this. Is it the Beatles? It's Bob Dylan.

Oh, damn, I got that wrong be surprised by me saying this. Is it the Beatles? It's Bob Dylan. Oh, damn, I got that wrong. Bob Dylan moves to New York from nowhere and pretends to be Woody Guthrie for a while until he gets his feet, until he works out his own voice. And that's kind of what's going on with Beckett there, isn't it? He moves from Dublin to Paris and he hangs around with Woody until he can sing his own song. I want to ask Nikki, what did you think you were going to get

when you read Beckett? Well, having been to see Waiting to Godot, I did have a sense of, Well, having been to see Waiting to Godot, I did have a sense of, and I remember quite clearly, probably like many people who go and see Waiting to Godot with no real kind of understanding of what Beck that actually it wasn't about the plot. It was about the form and it was about the difficult situations and what comes out of those. But I still don't kind of feel like I get a sense of this is a Beckett type character. So I'd be really interested to know more about what are the kind of, what are the things, the themes that have come up in all of all i think i think the thing about reading a load of beckett it um for making

this program is he is a brilliant example of of the artist who is it is in a state of becoming you know he's never quite arriving at the inevitable destination. I'll go on. You know, the idea that how much the work changes. Also, how much the work starts in this incredibly, as we'll hear in a minute, incredibly Rococo language, this outpouring of words, and then gradually begins to dry up as the decades go on,

moving towards silence, moving towards silence. Nicky, also I'll add, do you know what, when asked what Waiting for Godot is about, do you know what Sir Ian McKellen said? Isn't it about nothing twice or something like that?

It might well be. Sir Ian McKellen said, yes, I'll tell you what Waiting for Godot is about. It's about waiting. Yeah. And he wasn't

being arch. He said, he says in this wonderful interview, he says, that seems so obvious. But who prior to Beckett had realised

it was a common thing within humanity, we are all waiting for something I mean we're feeling other things he says at the same time but you know, what are we waiting for

and there's one thing, the only certainty of the things we're waiting for is at the end of the path, you know. So should we move on to... Let's move on to the next. John, what's our next choice? The next is a collection of 10 short stories by Samuel Beckett called More Pricks Than Kicks. It was published in 1934 by Chatterman Windus.

More Pricks Than Kicks, this collection of short stories, his first collection of short stories, sold in its first several years of availability, fewer than 500 copies. Got a £25 advance. And most of those were pulped. So it's a very rare and valuable book,

which Beckett himself was terribly reluctant to allow to be republished. Yeah, he dismissed it as juvenilia. And in some ways, maybe he's right in that it is much more, I mean, heavily Joycean than the books that he was to write afterwards. It's definitely, the stories are all basically the story are his main character is belacqua sure belacqua was a character from dante he's a bit of a feckless loot maker in dante so he takes he steals that name and you you follow um black where it begins as a student and you follow him through you know living in kind of student

accommodation you know bedsits you look you he gets married you know living in kind of student accommodation you know bedsits you look you he gets married three times in the course of this collection very unlike a beckett character he is the first in a way he's the first beckett character the book is full of verbal showing off characters beckett um good question nicky do you i mean i would say you know ultimately all all all are characters. Every author's characters are them to some degree or other. But do they resemble him? Some more than others.

We're going to go to Belacqua. Maybe it is. In this one, he upsets many family members. He does. Because he, you know, whether it's, you know, it's the classic literary thing becca a man who wrote a play called not i yeah or rambo's i is another you know the idea that it is you and it isn't you the fan but and yet at the same time that's fine as an artist and yet

your family members can still be very um disgruntled and upset when they've used themselves or things they've written um without their permission you know it's all very well to go i'm an artist you know but you didn't ask me uh it's it's very smart i think i know you're going to read a bit a great bit from the first story the bit that everybody remembers is that there is a there's a scene where a lobster is is is cooked in the end of dante and the lobster and the line which is you know a kind of what do they call it foreshadowing line um she lifted the lobster clear of the table it had about 30 seconds to live well it's a quick death god help us it is It is not. That's a very famous lie. Still a great lie. So before we hear from our own Billy Whitelaw,

Ms. Nick Birch, who will be performing a short extract from the first story in More Pricks Than Kicks, I have to reveal now, John, would I be right in thinking that the reason why you selected More Pricks Than Kicks is a reference to the 1986 LP

by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Kicking Against the Pricks, because that LP contains a cover of By the Time I Get to Phoenix, which is, of course, a song written by Jimmy Webb, whose autobiography I recommended on episode 49, bat-listed on Look at Me, by Anita Brugner.

And also, of of course a link to Nina Simone's Gun by Warren Ellis which we also talked about on episode 152 which was about Deadwood by Pete Dexter

that was a good book by the way that was a wonderful book did you enjoy these stories? enjoyment's probably the wrong word I well I'm going to take

the authorial Beckett's authorial event Beckett thought it was juvenilia I found some of it very funny the bit Nicky is going to read

I found very funny but I also found it a bit try hard I mean no I know one shouldn't say that it's about Samuel Beckett but he he would agree with that I think I think it's curiously something slightly heartless about about yes people don't read them anymore and I think it's if you want to kind of understand where the later stuff comes from you can see you wouldn't read this this indeed many people didn't,

you wouldn't think this guy's going to write Waiting for Godot one day. Well, Nicky is about to read a short section from the first story in the collection, which is called Dante and the Lobster. And this is Samuel Beckett's account of making lunch. Lunch, to come off at all, was a very nice affair. If his lunch was to be enjoyable,

and it could be very enjoyable indeed, he must be left in absolute tranquility to prepare it. But if he were disturbed now, if some brisk tattler were to come bouncing in now, big with a big idea or a petition, he might just as well not eat at all. For the food would turn to bitterness on his palate, or worse again, taste of nothing. He must be left strictly alone. He must have complete quiet and privacy to prepare the food for his lunch. The first thing to

do was to lock the door. Now nobody could come at him. He deployed an old herald and smoothed it out on the table. The rather handsome face of McCabe the assassin stared up at him. Then he lit the gas ring and unhooked the square flat toaster, asbestos grill from its nails and set it precisely on the flame. He found he had to lower the flame. Toast must not on any account be done too rapidly. We all agree with that. For bread to be toasted as ought it's through and

through it's relatable it must be done on a mild steady flame otherwise you only charred the outsides and left the pith as sodden as before if there was one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a bathos of pith and dough and it was so easy to do the thing properly so he thought having regulated the flow and adjusted the grill by the time i have the bread cut that it will be just right now the long barrel loaf came out of its biscuits in and had its end evened off on the face of mccabe two inexorable drives with the bread saw and a pair of neat rounds of raw bread the main elements of his meal lay before him, awaiting his pleasure.

The stump of the loaf went back into prison. The crumbs, as though they were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away, and the slices snatched up and carried to the grill. All these preliminaries were very hasty and impersonal. It was now that real skill began to be required. It was at this point that the average person began to make a hash of the entire proceedings. He laid his cheek against the soft of the bread. It was spongy and warm, alive. But he would very soon take that plush feel off it, by God, but he would very quickly take that fat white look off his face. He lowered the gas of suspicion and plaited one flabby slab plumped down on the glowing fabric

but very pat and precise so the whole resembled the Japanese flag then on top there not being room for the two do evenly side by side and if you did not

do them evenly you might just as well save yourself the trouble of doing them at all the other round was set to warm when the first candidate was done

which was only when it was black through and through it changed places with its comrade so that now it in its turn lay the top, done to a dead end, black and smoking, waiting till as much could be said of the other. Oh my God!

Nikki Birch, brilliant. Oh my God! Billy Whitelaw would be absolutely... Incredible! Standing aside for that. Incredible. Wow. Hey, Nicky,

when we asked you to do this five years ago, I don't think this was on the job description, was it? And do you know what? I have to say, that was a really good passage,

wasn't it? It is very funny. I mean, I have to say, Dante and the Lobster is a great story. I think it's a brilliant story. The bit that comes next

about the gorgonzola cheese and the sivora mustard. Yes, it's great. It's a book. It's one of the great sandwiches in literature. It's one of the great sandwiches in literature.

But also, you can hear, though, can't you, as well, that's precocious. The relish for the language. But it's slightly annoying. It's that kind of, look at me,

look at me do this. He just, throughout the book, he peppers it with, he's always showing, you know, words that you haven't heard before. But he was in his 20s when he wrote it. So we'll move forward a bit now. Beckett has a difficult but good war,

the Second World War. He is a member of the resistance, but he also heads to the south of France, to the Roussillon, and spends most of the war there. But his war experiences inform what happens to his writing next. And John, I think you've chosen one of the more famous ones now. one of the more famous ones now. He focuses on, you know, his literary career hardly becomes a stellar one.

And he spent a long time trying to get the three novels, Malloy, Malone Dies, and finally The Unnameable, published. He finally does get them published in the early 50s.

In fact, Unnameable, I think it's published in the same year, 1953, as Godot. Not only that, within months. Yeah. And again, I think it sold about 500 copies. It wasn't a massive success. What it is seen as in Beckett's development

is that the Beckett character, often alone, often in the dark, often with this existential uh battle of wanting to say something but then not really wanting to say something wanting to go on but not wanting to go on i mean you've in a way he felt that there was a blockage that he got to in his work in his fiction with the unnameable, which is essentially like one very, very long kind of paragraph, really. There's a brief introduction, and then you've got

pages and pages of... You're not quite sure who the character is. Does it have a body? It seems to be curled up at one moment. It's in a jar. There's another character called Mahoud, another character called Mahoud another character called as always

Madeleine he loves his M characters he kind of seems to claim that maybe he was the author of Malone Dies and Malloy it's like

it's like Nicky it's like Russian dolls or a box within a box within a box is this when he first

started to be do you think his brilliance came out? Yes. For me, it's the breakthrough into using language in a new way. Famously, in 1946, he goes back to Dublin. And the story, which actually reappears... Is this when his mum is sick?

His mum is sick. And his dad has died. And he has a sort of an experience at the end of Dundee Repeal. Turns out he wasn't really on dunleary pier he was at home when he had this experience but something something strikes him that he's been he's been going wrong in his work he needs to he needs to sort of move beyond the joycean showing off and that's when he goes back to paris and he starts to write in french

completely this has been written in french so the all three of these novels, in fact, pretty much all of his work from the late 40s onwards was written first in French. And, you know, Godot famously. Not one of the ones, two of the next ones we're talking about, which is interesting. But this was definitely,

and it's seen, and his English translation caused him great, he found it very difficult to translate this book into English. Well, I'm going to read a little bit of The Unnameable. Before I do that, I'm going to draw your attention to why I think John chose it in relation to that.

The reason why John chose The Unnameable is in an act of charity to his friend and co-host Andy Miller because it links to every single episode of Backlisted in which I introduced myself as the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Because I read this book as one of the 50 books that I read for The Year of Reading Dangerously. And in that book, I describe my unsuccessful first attempt, which is to try and read it on the page on a commuter train going in and out of london every day it was very i had to try and block out the rest of the carriage so i used to i used to listen to um things like metal machine music on my on my ipod reading samuel

in a bid to kind of just get white noise to to have the space in my head to read the pro and it wasn't very successful i didn't really get i didn't really get it at all and um and then i thought okay well what i'll do is i'll i'll i'll get the audio book and listen to the audio book and um what i decided i'd do i'd try and listen to it in one go great and this is me from the year of reading Dangerously at the point in which I actually went and did this. It's so strange to read this on the page because I did actually go and do this anyway. On a Sunday morning before Christmas,

I caught a train into town and took the bus to Primrose Hill. Climbing to the top, I could see the post office tower, the Snowdon Aviary, and a man shaking his fist at someone who was both much taller than him and invisible. It was still early. I planned to walk across the city, down the Euston Road, paying my respects at the Midnight Bell or a few pubs like it, because I just read 20,000 Streets and the Sky, everyone, through the West End and along the river to Hammersmith or beyond. It was going to take me all day to say goodbye. For company, I had Samuel Beckett.

On my iPod was an audiobook of The Unnameable, read by the actor Sean Barrett. The book ran just under six hours, long enough to carry me from Primrose Hill to Hammersmith. Perhaps it was cheating to listen to something the author intended to be read, but print on paper had not got me very far. I was going to try an alternative route. As I set off past the zoo and the roundhouse, along Camden High Street, past where all the record shops used to be, past the market and the Odeon Cinema on Parkway, Beckett's words murmured in my ear. They drifted around me, catching my attention, retreating, returning, insinuating themselves into my train of thought. I came here a lot once. We saw Blur at the Electric Ballroom.

Compendium, the bookshop, was over there. Burroughs and Bukowski tapes. Gone now. The Oxford Arms. That was where I saw Glenn Richardson perform his Todd Carty musical. Or was it an opera? On second thoughts, maybe that was the Hen and Chickens. It was all a long time ago. Some may complain that they cannot understand the unnameable, Beckett's publisher and champion John Calder has written. But they should ask themselves how well they understand not only their own lives, but what they see when they look out at the world, how they interpret what they see, little of which could be understood anyway, and especially how they think themselves, what makes them think, what they think about and why, and how they separate what they know from everyday events from what they know from dreams. As I walked from Camden onwards, letting the unnameable spool, I traversed not one but three places called London, the city I had lived in for so long,

Patrick Hamilton's 20,000 streets still humming in my mind, and this unreal city, shaped by memory and daydreams and Beckett's unravelling commentary. After a couple of miles, I had to sit down, not from fatigue, but because I was overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. In a pub I did not recognize, somewhere in limbo, I sat and nursed a pint and listened to this. I hope this preamble will soon come to an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. Unfortunately, I am afraid, as always, of going on, for to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing,

moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want. Take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I'll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story as if it were the first time. So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge yet again. Is there really nothing new to try?

Amazing. It is amazing. Brilliantly read as well, Andy. Beautiful. It's a very strange feeling. The context of that was really useful as well. Right. It's really interesting.

You know, the thing Calder says there, I remember when I was putting this chapter together, is that brilliant observation. Think to yourself, how well do you actually know the reality of what you perceive? And if you're not certain, what is contained in the uncertainty? That's sort of what he's writing about there, I think.

I mean, it's the stripping away of everything, of plot, of agency agency of other characters you know it's there is no narrative in this book but what there is is this extraordinary language it's complete and the bit of the harold pinter that you heard right at the beginning of the podcast was him that was the very end of the novel the famous i'll go on i believe i was ever that young. Well, the voice, Jesus, and the aspirations, and the resolutions. To drink less, in particular. Statistics. 1,700 hours out of the preceding 8,000 odd consumed on licensed

premises alone, more than 20%, say, 40% of his waking life. Plans for a less engrossing sexual life. Lastly, Elizabeth's father, flagging pursuit of happiness, unattainable

laxation, sneers at what he calls his youth, and thanks to God it's over. False ring there, huh? Shadows of the Opus Magna. Closing with a... Yet to providence. What remains of all that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat on a railway station platform no

okay welcome back everybody now i don't know why john mitchinson would choose for backlisted this episode a text in which an old man rakes through recordings from his past. I don't know what he was thinking, but that is an excerpt from Crap's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, performed by Patrick McGee, the actor for whom that piece was written. It is my favourite thing by Beckett, Crap's Last Tape.

I'm so happy that you chose it, John. It is my favourite thing by Beckett and I can prove I've got my, what the 18 year old undergraduate me. Incredible. Oh my goodness. Here is my essay, which is called The Things to Say About Craps Last Tape.

That's what I called it. You know what? You should have taped this so we could play it back. I've got underneath it says, Literature is like phosphorus. It shines with its maximum brilliance when it attempts to die. Roland Barthes, writing degree zero, 1953.

It's like that was the year I not only was I obsessed with Beckett, that was the year I also read Roland Barthes for the first time. And what did your teacher say about this essay? Well, she said this is so embarrassing. This is embarrassing. Oh, no, please. Since you asked. She said,

how could I impose a mark on such intelligent and artistic creativity in A plus or what go down on the books? This is a delight to perceive, as the remark goes. I hope you'll manage such heights in the exam, John. Which, I don't know, I think I did. I've got to tell listeners that John is hugging the tape player and crying while he listens to tell listeners that John is hugging the tape player and crying while he listens to himself read that

I love the fact that you still have your English essay from oh that's amazing I want to come on John we'll

each take turn you go last but I want to start with Nicky now I know you've never seen this before yeah and there are several

incredible performances of Pratt's Last Tape available now on YouTube. If you want to see McGee, for whom it was written, perform it, there's a wonderful BBC production from the early 1970s. If you want to see the playwright Harold Pinter

perform Perhaps Last Tape very near the end of his life, that is very moving. Very moving. And if you want to see John Hurt, the late john hurt filmed 2000 2001 that's on youtube and that is the version i recommended to you because i think that's my favorite um what did you make of it yeah i thought it was actually incredible that was

incredible isn't it as a premise as well it made me just think fucking hell he's a good actor you know that was like the first thing yes

that was a real he really can act yeah but but but also just just for those if anyone doesn't know it

if you were like me a novice the premise of an old man listening back is on his birthday listening back to aware uh to tapes that he's made recordings of himself previously made on his birthday because like it feels like that an annual thing that he does he makes these tapes and looks back and then he's making a new one that yeah and he every time he he seems to sort of be more and more bitter and he's listening back to these tapes and sometimes

he's listening back to tapes that where he's listening back to old tapes yeah yeah and which is such a clever premise and uh and i and as a sort of as a sort of podcast editor i'm so interested in this because no because quite often you hear these brilliant podcasts where they're having to think about how you bring in tape yeah and and how you bring in like they have to come up with formats and form where you're having to bring in old tape and this is actually the sort of perfect example of one that is that he's done and that love hearing him laugh along with his his past self yeah um you know all all of Beckett's about creating company, for instance. Right.

The characters are always creating company. There's sort of three characters in this, isn't there? You know, there's himself and now, himself before and himself even earlier. And he kind of, he seems to be this sort of, hilariously, another bitter author kind of reflecting on an unsuccessful life. It's about books. Sold. Sold 11 copies.

Yeah. Circulating library. But he also, he feels like he shouldn't be listening to these tapes, but he does. He's like, I know I shouldn't do this. Well, he's like everybody and everybody who watches, you know, videos now of things that they've, of their lost girlfriends or their old, you know, it's, it's that, it's addictive behavior.

He keeps. Well, look, I was, I was watching the, girlfriends or their old you know it's it's that it's addictive behavior he keeps well look i was i was watching the i watched like three or four versions of this on the on successive days and then stumbled over a tweet of mine from three or four years ago and looked at it and thought i don't remember writing i don't remember the things that happened in that suddenly we've all built these little archives of ourselves like crapsstar State. I found it so interesting because he's listening to them knowing that it's painful

listening to them and yet making another recording knowing that at some point he might listen to that and that's going to be painful. It's like he knows it's going to be awful. Yeah.

The thing I found watching them again, particularly, I think actually the reason why I like Hurt's performance so much, Beckett wrote Crap's Last Tape inspired by Patrick McGee's crapped voice, he said.

So he wrote it because he wanted to hear McGee's voice say those words, and contrast the man in his pomp pomp in his prime with the with the more decrepit uh individual but actually the great gift of craps last take that beckett gives to any actor who plays it is how much of the time they say nothing. They are listening and reacting and telling you how to feel about what you're hearing. And when you watch McGee, there's these incredible close-ups of his, you know,

he's very sweating and he's clearly traumatized by it. Whereas Hurt gives off this different sense of the aging man. He seems bewildered to me. This sense of being lost. He's lost in whatever space. Apparently Gambon was amazing as Capcrap. And also Max Wall was another.

But I think that the pathos is the thing that is so overwhelming. And the end of the play, which the 18-year-old me said, at the end of the play, at the end of his last take, its silence becomes audible. It flows on passively like time. Thus, paradoxically, the darkness exists only as an absence of light silence is an absence of sound and solitude is absence of company by venturing into the dark crap is made aware of his light by speaking he realizes silence and by devising company

acknowledges that he is alone crap is alone the dust is his and what do you think of that 18 year old self's quote now it's pretty good it's quite a bit you know it's a bit pretentious but I mean it's pretty good it's very good John

come on I think I love this play more than almost any other and you know what's that thing we used to have where you have

Rachel and I always say not with the fire in me now that's just one of you know that's one of our lines say what are you doing no not with the fire in me now that's just one of you know that's one of our lines yeah yeah yeah say what you're doing no not with the fire in me now

yeah oh what you mean phrases one just says around the house yeah I bought it for you as an independent candidate exactly

yeah just drop a big Indian phrase not with the fire in me now so I've got a few little clips for our I thought it might be time for a quiz

yeah it's definitely quiz time I've got a few clips from our archive things that we didn't record on our birthday that's young whelp let's pretend it was our birthday given it's going to be and what's the quiz element please

the quiz is I have got a few clips of you guys talking about books from the backlisted Archive. And you're going to listen to yourself and you're going to try and work out what book you're talking about. Oh, no.

Okay? Yeah, great. This is too meta. Go on. This could be really tricky. Go on. This is clip one. Also, you would have to say that because this is,

this was her first novel it's sort of it's held together not by craft though there is craft in it but just her talent it's held together by her energy

and her talent any thoughts on that? we're literally Andy and I are looking at each other with no idea luckily I have another clip to help you out on that? We're literally, Andy and I are looking at each other with no idea. Luckily, I have another clip to help you out on that one. Really? Yeah.

Is it the same book? It's the same one, yeah. It's a little bit, making it a little bit easier. She manages to do that thing, again, I think through force of personality, really, of telling you a story where you want to know what happens next. Okay, well, that's what you want from a novel. But also being very thoughtful, philosophically thoughtful, and also being quite weird.

And as we said, the novel takes a very peculiar twist at the halfway point. Also funny. I mean, it's so funny. It's so brilliantly turned in terms of phrase for phrase. It's Lolly Willows by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It is Lolly Willows! Well done.send Warner. It is Lolly Willows! Well done. Thank you, John.

Well done. Saved my blushes. Okay, are you ready for question two? Okay, go on. Douglas Adams' description of Woodhouse as Woodhouse as pure word music. And at her best, you can feel her when she writes getting into kind of that kind

of flow where the words are beginning to form this beautiful light kind of andante uh of humor humor and intelligence kind of pushing the thing along i'm like patrick m McGee sweating at this point traumatised by this I'm going to say because we don't listen back to the show I should I play another one for that

yeah go on she has a positive moral message to make about the value of sex and about the value of relationships and the importance

of kindness and the importance of love in relationships and that to be in her world is a very comforting and reassuring she's she's a really good author to read at times of stress she's a really good author to read in times of stress there was a really moving discussion that we had about this about an author who can talk about sex, but also in times of stress.

Elizabeth Jane Howard? No. Wait, wait. With a Cambridge professor. Jilly Cooper. Yeah. It's Jilly Cooper. Of course it's Jilly Cooper.

Okay. Pure word music. Well done, Annie Miller. Okay, one more. We always say this on Backlisted, when it's true, and in this case it is true rather than the ecstatic truth,

it's the actual truth. This isn't like any other book. No. Most books are like other books, but this one isn't. And that in itself is a reason for reading it. It's like a kind of trippy fairy tale. It's like a trippy fairy tale.

Is it Vette's daughter, Barbara Cummings? No, it's not. I think it's so brilliant. You've created a Biketti and Luke, Vicky, where you've got me saying, we say this all the time on Baclister, this is a book that's not like other books. A phrase I've used over and over again.

I haven't got another clip for that. But all I can say is, I'll give you a little clue. Sorry. It's one of John's best impressions. Oh, it's one of John's best impressions. Oh, no. It's a book by a woman? It's not a book by a woman

I tell you what that makes me think of it makes me think of John's reading from Ulverton live on stage at the end of the road

which was one of the most amazing things he's ever done is it trippy though trippy trippy so I'm going to tell you it's Werner Herzog

oh no I was end of the road I was just one oh no that was very close do the Herzog isn't there a new I think very much

there is a new a book a novel I think no not a there is a new book, a novel, I think. No, not a novel, a memoir. Memoir. It's a memoir. Which we are looking forward to greatly on back. Right.

We better crack on, guys. We're going to get kicked out of the studio. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So, John, what have you set up for us as the final text? The final text I have set up is Company, which was published in 1980. And the reason I chose this was that I was at university writing this essay in 1981. And the idea of a new book,

he hadn't written a work of fiction novel for something like 20 years. And it was that amazing feeling thinking, oh my like you're saying about bob dylan on stage samuel becker is out there somewhere still writing i mean you know this great this man who knew joyce this great 20th century nobel prize which the 80s he's still there he's still a very handsome old man for a recluse he was a very handsome old man. For a recluse, he was a gentleman of whom there is thousands of photographs

looking great. You've seen the sexy shots in Tangiers when he was on holiday. And you know there's a film just released today. It's the 3rd of November, which is about... He lived with Suzanne, his partner,

but he did have an affair with his translator Barbara Bray and the film apparently is giving the full Hollywood treatment

you know he's a hero of the resistance and he's got women fighting over I can't imagine Gabriel Bearburn

plays Beck I'm kind of intrigued to see what they've done let's go and see it we should but Company is a and Company was written in English english as craps last tape was which was very

almost nothing he wrote towards the end of his life was written in english and it is another book where he revisits his childhood he revisits his the death of his mother his his and his father it's really beautiful a complex book but i mean one, again, I think with crap, it's right up there. Well, I assumed that you had chosen Company because it's, of course, the name of one of Stephen Sondheim's finest musicals. And in fact, the Sondheim musical is not based on the Beckett novella. And we covered Sondheim's books in episode 155 in 2022 and but also I wondered John sentimentally whether you had chosen company because perhaps the nicest thing I think the

three of us making that list in the last eight years is how much we have enjoyed one another's company, talking about books, particularly during the period of the pandemic. I know I can say that those recordings we made during the darkest times of COVID were so important to me to feel a connection to the world and talk about something else and not be frightened for an hour or two. And so when you recommended company, I had that idea in my head. And I'd never read this before.

It's incredible. It's one of those times you think, oh yeah, okay. This amazing book, this short book, which we think of as late work by the famous writer Samuel Beckett, is actually extraordinary. You need know nothing about Beckett. Absolutely. Nothing about Beckett's life in the terms we've described it.

To pick this up, read it, be deeply moved by it. The contrast between the prose in this, John, and the prose Nikki read so adeptly from More Kicks Than Pricks. Yeah. You know, the move towards silence and Beckett using rhythm and repetition and plain speaking. I really, I found it tremendously moving.

So thank you very, very much. Thank you so much. I'm pleased that there is just a a note of lyricism which i think kind of connects back to that lyricism that that is in in crap as well and i i would say on the company thing i think yeah i mean you know beckett is all about whatever else is left we always create another we always create we always whether it's a take a voice on a tape or with our own voice or our memories we have we have to you know human beings do not exist cannot exist in a vacuum and no writer has pursued that thought more kind of courageously and relentlessly than beckett but

i just i think this is of all the late beckett works this is the one I go back to. Do you want me to read a little bit? Yes, please. You take pity on a hedgehog out in the cold and put it in an old hat box with some worms. This box with the hog inside you then place in a disused hutch, wedging the door open for the poor creature to come out and go at will, to go in search of food and have it eaten to regain the warmth and security of its box in the hutch. There then is the hedgehog in its box in the hutch,

with enough worms to tide it over, a last look to make sure all as it should be, before taking yourself off to look for something else to pass the time, heavy already on your hands at that tender age. The glow at your good deed is slower than usual to cool and fade. You glowed readily in those days, but seldom for long. Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part, or by some little triumph over your rivals,

or by a word of praise from your parents or mentors, when it would begin to cool and fade, leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before, even in those days. But not this day. It wasn't an autumn afternoon you found the hedgehog and took pity on it in the way described, and you were still the better for it when your bedtime came. Kneeling at your bedside, you included it, the hedgehog, in your detailed prayer to God to bless all you love. And tossing in your warm bed, waiting for sleep to come, you were still faintly glowing at the thought of what a fortunate hedgehog it was to have crossed

your path as it did. A narrow clay path, edged with sear box edging. As you stood there, wondering how best to pass the time till bedtime, it parted the edging on one side and was making straight for the edging on the other when you entered its life. Now, the next morning, not only was the glow spent, but a great uneasiness had taken its place, a suspicion that all was perhaps not as it should be. That rather do do as you did, you had perhaps better let good alone and the hedgehog pursue its way.

Days, if not weeks, passed before you could bring yourself to return to the hutch. You've never forgotten what you found there. You were on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found there. The mush, The stench. And now, the tape has run out.

We'd love to go on, but there is no more time. Thank you for listening. If you want show notes with clips links and suggestions for further reading this show and the 198 that we've already recorded please visit our website at batlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed you can of course visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Threads, Pigeon Post.

However you can reach us, please do. Real to real. If you want to hear Backlisted early and without ads, subscribe to our Patreon. www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. You subscribe at the lot listener level for the price of a bunch of fair trade bananas. You'll get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. We call it Locklisted because it began in the Wenlock Tavern just before lockdown.

And it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films, and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoy our What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of thanks and gratitude like this. Philip Hill. Thank you.

Martine. Harry Hornby. Peter Office. And Stephen Marsden. Oh, there's some more. Robert Selkov, thank you so much. Bill W. Thank you, Bill W.

Mark O'Neill, Rachel Wensley, and thank you very much, Chris Forston. Thank you, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much. John, that was one of the most incredible readings, and we're all very moved sitting here in the studio. So there you go. Also, John's very ill. Hopefully that won't be the most incredible readings and we're all very moved sitting here in the studio. So there you go. Also, John's very ill. Hopefully that won't be the last time you hear from him.

That would be a terrible... Not with the fire in me now. Don't go. Not with the fire in me now, Andy. So that's what I want to say. This has been a gift. This whole podcast is a gift in our lives and this show has been wonderful.

Thank you so much, both of you. Nikki. I just want to thank you for introducing me to and making me kind of come on board because I just wouldn't have this experience. You were really windy earlier, weren't you? I was. But hasn't it been amazing?

It's been fantastic. And I think, you know, it's just that whole thing about enthusiasm brings people with you. And you've done you know, it's just that whole thing about enthusiasm brings people with you. And you've done that with me. So thank you so much. Beautiful. John Mitchinson.

Well, the last thing I wanted to say, I just wanted to share a little thing. When I left Waterstones, just to show, they bought me a little edition minuit of Beckett's Sept Foix. And it is a little signed by Sam himself. He's in the room with us now. What an incredible thing. Sam Beckett.

It says Sam Beckett. It does. A little pamphlet. So one of my most precious books. Wonderful. And I think we're going to, obviously the next one is the big one, 200. We're going to sign off,

but we are going to leave you with a little bit of Sam. So thanks all for listening. We'll see you next time, 200th show. See you in a fortnight. And I just said he was in the room. Let's listen to the tape. Let's hug the tape recorder and listen. This is Samuel Beckett himself.

Very rare recording of him reading from his novel, What? The Poem. very rare recording of him reading from his novel, What, a poem. What will not surpass one just, but of what? Of the coming to, of the being us, of the going from, not habitat. Of the long way, of the short stay, of the going back home the way he had come. Of the empty heart, of the empty empty hands of the dim mind wayfaring through barren lands of a flame with dark winds

hedged about going out gone out of the empty heart of the empty hands of the dark mind stumbling through barren lands that is of what what will not abate one toss.