[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.
Some of those most commonly repeated include phrases like "good moments," "movements of the lower face no sound," and "I quote it as I hear it."
His journey is abundant with images from a life above, including scenes involving things such as a woman and religious instruction in childhood.
In a letter (April 6, 1960) to Donald McWhinnie of the BBC Radio Drama Company, Beckett explained his strange text as the product of a " 'man' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his 'life' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him...
"[7] The theme may be the struggle of form to emerge from formlessness using Leopardi's sense of the world as mud (E fango è il mondo) and therefore, a kind of purgatory, as well as Dante's image of souls gulping mud in the Stygian marsh of the Inferno (Canto VII, 109–126, in Palma's translation): Dante's Belacqua and his foetal position also are referenced in How It Is and the following quotation is an example of the work's unpunctuated, dense, and poetic style: Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 short film "La Paresse" begins and ends with shots of Eddie Constantine and Nicole Mirel reading Beckett's work as well as of the text itself.