Literature

By pure coincidence, my poetry books - loosely ordered alphabetically - are bookended by two slim volumes by Russian poets. In the late 1960s, Penguin Books published their Penguin Modern European Poets series. At 20p a pop these pocket-sized gems were well-worth the spend and did sterling work in broadening my reading horizons. Anna Akhmatova comes before Apollinaire and Beckett just as Yevgeny Yevtushenko followed the Thomases. In between them the collection is dotted with other well-thumbed volumes in the same series.

Samuel Beckett’s first sight of the words in his head would have been as they flowed from his pen, not as his typewriter’s typebars left their individual ink ribbon marks. His first drafts were in notebooks with a pen (or pencil in the case of Watt). From these handwritten notebooks he then used a typewriter to prepare typescripts. These then underwent often protracted proof-reading and correction, but Beckett never bypassed that pen and paper stage. For the Nobel laureate, the pen was indeed a mighty thing.