Worstward Ho appeared in publication in 1983: it was its 40th anniversary just a few weeks ago. Also, in 1983, the literary critic Al Alvarez wrote about How It Is, another of Beckett’s tricky texts: “... despite its formidable appearance the work is always coherent, once the reader has laboriously tuned in to its difficult wave length. Even at its most disintegrated, when the shattered syntax is scarcely that of the gasp, there is a kind of clenched lucidity about Beckett’s writing that somehow justifies one’s efforts. … With patience and concentration, the reader need never be at a loss. The difficulties are all public and resolvable.” Of course, it has been our aim in presenting Worstward Ho, whose difficult wave-length we have been patiently decoding for ourselves for over 3 years, to bring to you its hard-won coherence and lucidity. But, at the same time we do not want to avoid its ‘clenchedness.’ Here is a man, on his own, grappling with the task of thinking about central, existential questions. But it is not in the resolution of those questions that the fascination of the text lies. It is in the task of thinking itself: its dis/integration, its shatteredness. In our private moments, we don’t think like logicians write: our thinking breaks into unexpected detours, obsessive repetitions, moments of wry humour, deep emotion etc. It is in this way that the gems of revelation arise – if indeed they do. The little sparkle, hid in ashes, the precious margaret hid from many, and the thing that the conversationalist, with his contempt of the tag and ready-made, can’t give you because the lift to the high spot is precisely from the tag and the ready-made. The same with the stylist. You couldn’t experience a margarita because he denies you the pebbles and flints that reveal it. The uniform, horizontal writing flowing without accidence, of the man with a style, never gives you the margarita. (Beckett on Writing) This is a prose text; but Beckett is always the most physical of writers. One of our guides in putting it into action has been this passage from Deirdre Bair’s biography of Samuel Beckett: Bill Beckett bought an automobile that year, a Swift, and Beckett drove it around Trinity very badly but with enormous style. He shifted gears with sweeping, dramatic arm movements, and involved his entire torso in negotiating turns. He made blowing the horn a musical art and parking was an exercise in dance and mathematics with an occasional fillip from the latest Mack Sennett comedy. Dance, mathematics and the occasional fillip – welcome to Worstward Ho.