Read Murphy Online

Authors: Samuel Beckett

Murphy

BOOK: Murphy
13.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

SAMUEL BECKETT

Murphy

Edited by J. C. C. Mays

I

Murphy
is the first extended piece of writing that Beckett was satisfied with, and it is easy to see why. What he wrote before, in both verse and prose, had been dazzling, clever and inventive, and yet the same qualities evidently derived as much from an instinct to withhold as from the desire to share – talent gets paraded in front of what cannot bear examination. The
accomplishment
represented by
Murphy
therefore marks a turning point. It gave its author sufficient self-belief to sustain him through tedious negotiations with a succession of publishers, during which he refused to revise what he had written. It made it reasonable for him to set about translating the English
publication
into French himself as his next task, and later, following
Godot
, its publication in America prepared the way for a broader understanding of his writing throughout the English-speaking world.
Murphy
is the book in which Beckett discovered his first, most pressing theme or, more accurately, the beginning of a way to manage a situation in which he found himself immured. The protagonist is the first of a series whose names begin with the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, on whom Beckett’s writing afterwards came to turn. Conflicted ambitions complicate his earlier writing, and the same frustration is not completely under control in
Murphy
, but what bitterness survives is balanced by another, sweeter quality, a ‘compassion’ that Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey intuited from the first, and that survived to spread a benign influence across the writing of his later years.

Murphy
was written by hand in six notebooks across the space of ten months, and the pace of Beckett’s progress is 
charted by references in letters to MacGreevy and other friends. He had returned to London from Dublin in September 1934 and had been in lodgings in Gertrude Street in West Brompton almost a year before he sat down to write. He began in
mid-August
1935 and wrote some 9,000 words during the following four weeks, at which point he revealed that he had already decided the kite-flying episode in Hyde Park would conclude the book. Pressing on, he completed 20,000 words by October and had only three chapters to go by February 1936. The
collection
of poems,
Echo’s Bones
, was published in November 1935, and he returned home to Foxrock in December. Work on the novel was halted for a couple of months but revived with
springtime
in the garret of Clare Street, Dublin, where he had earlier written
More Pricks Than Kicks
, and he was able to bring it to a close by early June 1936, dispatching a typescript to Chatto and Windus, the publishers of both
Proust
and
More Pricks Than Kicks
, before the end of the same month.

The more or less steady advance in the process of
composition
suggests a sense of purpose in the writing of
Murphy
that is confirmed by surrounding preparations and circumstances. The book draws on Beckett’s experience of living in London, and on material he noted in his reading or drafted previously. However, he read for the new task with deliberate intent – in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Fielding, Spinoza and Geulincx – in a way that reinforced, rather than confused, his design. Thus, a rejected short story entitled
Lightning Calculation
(now at Reading University Library), centring on a protagonist called Quigley, provides a character who makes a fleeting appearance (p. 13) and contributes material incorporated in the Lyons tea shop episode. The
Whoroscope
notebook (also at Reading) contains notes and synopses of material concerning horoscopes and the duties of male nurses at Bedlam, among other things, which were entered before, during and quite late in the process of composition. Beckett underwent therapy before and during the period when he was writing, and his reading in Gestalt and Külpe psychology finds a place, but the visits to his friend 
Geoffrey Thompson at Bethlem Royal Hospital in Kent between February and October 1935 were deliberate field trips undertaken to gather material. Although he was still writing under the shadow of Joyce’s working methods, the nexus of
allusion
here is held in place by a firmer sense of purpose than ever before. The book was written out of a sense of a dilemma
understood
as both personal and shared: the half-allowed pretension to mastery is simultaneously a joke and, seriously, an image of this crucial dilemma.

The instinct that led Beckett from one method of writing to another, as he moved on from prentice work to discover his own subject and style, was confirmed by the revisions he made between the time he first submitted his book for publication and when it was published two years later.
Murphy
was turned down by Chatto on 15 July 1936, then by Heinemann on 4 August, soon after which he gave a copy to George Reavey to circulate among English publishers, as he had given another copy to Mary Manning Howe to do the same in the US. At the end of September 1936 he left for Germany, and did not return until the beginning of April 1937. A succession of rejections by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic followed during his absence, some indicating that they might be interested if changes to make the book more saleable were allowed, which Beckett in his turn refused summarily to do. Eventually,
following
dismal months at Foxrock during which he had a car
accident
, failed to make progress with a play centred on Dr Johnson, left again for Paris (October) and returned briefly to Dublin to take part in a bruising libel action on behalf of his uncle, he learned at long last – back in Paris, on 9 December 1937 – that
Murphy
had been accepted for publication by Routledge. Jack Yeats recommended it to his own editor there, T. Murray Ragg, and the usual literary reader Herbert Read afterwards confirmed Ragg’s acceptance with enthusiasm. As it happens, Beckett was stabbed in the street in the early hours of 7 January 1938, and received page proofs while he was recovering from stab wounds in hospital. He made alterations 
and insertions, and the book went into production in February. Materials for 1,500 copies were printed and copies went on sale on 7 March, price 7/6d. Beckett was surprised and cheered by the turn events had taken and only disappointed that the cover failed to include a photograph of two chimps playing chess that had caught his eye in the
Daily Sketch
at the time he finished writing.

Beckett’s preparations and the composition of his text were particularly orderly; similarly Routledge’s production was notably efficient, but the relation between the two sets of events contains complications that are significant. First, while the text of
Murphy
draws on the unpublished story
Lightning Calculation
and the
Whoroscope
notebook, these materials are prior to and/or supplementary to the process of composition, not
constitutive
. Story and notebook are used in different ways, to be sure, but they both fall into the category of what German editors call
paralipomena
. The letters and private memoranda to which reference has also been made are similarly adjacent. Second, the manuscript in which Beckett wrote out his novel continuously in six small exercise books, is in private hands and not available for consultation. Beckett gave it to his friend Brian Coffey, who in turn sold it on during the 1960s, and the brief accounts we have of it – for instance, by Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson – are insufficient to gauge its relationship to the extant typescript. One can only guess that the sixth exercise book, which has a different-coloured cover, might contain the closing chapters of the work completed after the bout of writer’s block in Ireland.

Finally, the corrected carbon at the Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, bound in cloth-backed wrappers and signed and dated by its author at 6 Clare Street, 26 June 1936, must be treated with caution. Beckett mentioned to Reavey a year later that there were three manuscripts (he presumably meant typescript copies): the HRC carbon, which is numbered III, presumably remained in his possession during the time that the other two circulated independently as directed by Reavey 
and Manning. The HRC carbon is also, presumably, the copy known to have been lent at different times to MacGreevy, Coffey and Denis Devlin to read before publication. This, together with the fact that it includes a correction not taken forward into the Routledge printing, suggests that it was not the typescript used for setting the printed copy. Indeed, the two pairs of verse lines that appear on page 235 of the Routledge text are not present in the HRC typescript, yet they are ticked in the
Whoroscope
notebook (they derive from songs by Robert Greene and George Peele, respectively), which confirms the sophisticated position occupied by HRC in the line of descent. Other instances where the Routledge text diverges from the HRC typescript are the insertion of ‘the Pergamene Barlach’ into Routledge page 239, and the contraction of a previously more elaborate description of ‘the ravaged face’ on page 282. The only conclusion must be that Beckett supplied copy in another typescript, now lost, and it is on record that he made changes on proofs that are now also lost. The consequence is that while it is clear how the book came together, there are gaps in the story of its production that leave room for disagreement over the details of the text Beckett intended. I return to this matter below.

II

Reviews of the Routledge
Murphy
appeared within weeks of publication and were mixed. Kate O’Brien’s in
The Spectator
pleased Beckett most, and Dylan Thomas’s in the
New English Weekly
was perceptive. O’Brien communicated her enjoyment and made it her book of the week, praising its ‘gladdening, quickening’ spirit. She admitted that there was much she failed to understand but insisted that this did not matter: ‘Rarely, indeed have I been so entertained by a book, so tempted to superlatives and perhaps hyperboles of praise.’ Thomas differed from others who balanced praise with blame. He straightforwardly called the book ‘wrong’, but in explaining 
how its qualities are at variance demonstrated that he took Beckett’s literary methods seriously. The following year, the only review to appear in Ireland – by Austin Clarke, anonymously in the
Dublin Magazine
– damned it with
circumspection
, while Beckett’s position among his younger
contemporaries
was sketched for French readers with greater understanding by Anatole Rivoallan in his survey
Littérature Irlandaise contemporaine
. The most searching response, by Brian Coffey, did not find a publisher and may therefore be said to be the best review the book never had. (It may now be found, with a surrounding commentary, in
The Recorder:
A Journal of the American Irish Historical Society
18:1–2 (Fall 2005), 95–114.) Coffey presented the confrontation between Murphy and Mr Endon, as seen by the author – the qualification being
all-important
– as the heart of the matter, and Beckett’s
appreciation
can be gauged by his subsequent gift of the manuscript to Coffey. How widely the book circulated and was absorbed into the literary tradition is another matter: it appeared at the end of a decade when a decade of literary experiment was overtaken by a world war.

Routledge appear not to have anticipated immediately large sales. Three different bindings that now command high prices for the first edition among collectors suggest that copies were made available as need arose, copies in the third binding being sold at a reduced price of 4/- . The publisher’s records show that about 568 copies sold in 1938, 23 in 1939, 20 in 1940 and 7 in 1941, and the book was allowed to go out of print in March 1943. Only half the 1,500 copies printed were bound up and circulated, and the 750 unbound sheets were sold on. What happened to them is unknown: they might have been destroyed in an air raid or simply shredded. Beckett’s profits amounted to £20 minus income tax. If he had written no more, his book would have fallen into place in the wake of Joyce,
alongside
Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds
(1939) – another ‘experimental’ novel issued by a prudent London publisher in successive, different bindings – and Raymond Queneau’s
On est
 
toujours trop bon avec les femmes
(1947). Ten and more years on, the book continued to attract discriminating admirers – Iris Murdoch, Vivian Mercier, Aidan Higgins – but they were a small and scattered band.

Meanwhile, barely a month after the Routledge publication, Beckett began translating his novel into French. His reasons were mixed: partly, one supposes, he understood the value of what he had written, to himself if not immediately to the reading public; partly because, while his future appeared to lie in Paris, a crossroads in his evolving career left him feeling at a loose end. He enlisted the help of his old friend Alfred Péron,
lecteur
at Trinity College Dublin in 1926–28, who was now teaching at the Lycée Buffon: they translated nine chapters by December 1939 and finished the whole by February 1940. Beckett continued to revise the translation in a desultory way during 1940, and following the end of the war, in October 1945, Bordas issued a contract for a French
Murphy
and all future work in French and English. The French
Murphy
was published on 15 April 1947, dedicated to Péron, who had died in a
concentration
camp in 1945, as number five in a series supposedly ‘marqué par un caractère de recherche et d’aventure spirituelle’. The venture was oddly conceived and the publishers made no effort to have Beckett’s contribution reviewed. Reports of the number of copies sold vary, but it was certainly small: perhaps as few as the Routledge edition, without the burst of sales during the first year. According to the Bordas records, only 735 copies of the 3,500 printed had been sold after four years, which reduces to 285 copies because 350 were defective and 100 were given away free. A dispute arose, Bordas asked Beckett to repay what he had been advanced and, after negotiations extending from May 1951 to December 1953, Bordas agreed to Jerôme Lindon’s purchase of the remaining 2,750 copies in their possession. Lindon, who had already published the three novels of Beckett’s French trilogy and
En attendant Godot
under the Éditions de Minuit imprint, issued the Bordas sheets of
Murphy
in new covers in 1954. A second Minuit edition was called 
for in 1956, a third in 1965 and so on: the novel was quickly assimilated into Beckett’s French oeuvre.

BOOK: Murphy
13.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

James and Dolley Madison by Bruce Chadwick
Friendswood by Rene Steinke
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah
Off the Crossbar by David Skuy
Husband and Wives by Susan Rogers Cooper