I’ve carried a false memory with me for many years now, that on the occasion of Beckett’s death the Independent newspaper (re)published ‘Stirrings Still’—that I cut it out and pasted it into a notebook I had at the time and which I still have (and in which are also venerated: Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Mark E. Smith). It’s the notebook of a boy, but when I leaf through it now, it’s all there—it seems I’ve grown older but not up.
But I can find no evidence that The Independent ever did this. It turns out that the Guardian had run ‘Stirrings Still’ nine months earlier—I must have got it there. Beckett’s was the first death of a public figure at which I felt visceral, gutting emotion (the second was Mark E. Smith, thirty years later).
We’re just one letter short of being able to anagram ‘distill’ from the story’s title, and that is what it really is. The theatrical works are what went out into the world but for me it’s all about his short fictions and above all ‘Stirrings Still’—it’s my if-you-only-ever-read-one-thing-by-him perennial.
First published in a limited edition illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, John Calder, 1988. Now available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber, 2009
A Personal Anthology 