Monday, November 17, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 61 / Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 61

Murphy

by Samuel Beckett (1938)

Samuel Beckett’s first published novel is an absurdist masterpiece, a showcase for his uniquely comic voice

Samuel Beckett's Murphy draft bought by Reading University for £1m

Robert McCrum

Monday 17 November 2014

“T

he sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.

Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.

Murphy, which would soon become overshadowed by the international success of Waiting for Godot, is the first in a series of novels whose titles – Molloy; Malone Dies – begin with the 13th letter of the alphabet. Beckett, always nomadic, had returned to London from Dublin in September 1934 and taken lodgings in Gertrude Street, West Brompton. The novel draws extensively on his experience of living in London and the character of Murphy has plenty of Beckett in him.

Samuel Beckett
Mathieu Laca

The workshy eponymous hero, a “seedy solipsist”, adrift in the alienating metropolis, realises that his desires can never be fulfilled conventionally. He withdraws from life in search of a personal stupor. When the novel opens, Murphy has tied himself to the rocking chair in his flat with seven scarves and is rocking to and fro in the darkness. This practice, apparently habitual, has become Murphy’s way of achieving an existential state of being that gives him deep private satisfaction. Even his lover, Celia, cannot lure him back into the world. As Murphy’s comico-philosophical meditation unfolds, we meet his circle of fellow eccentrics, notably Mr Neary, from Cork, who has the ability, through what he calls “Apmonia”, to stop the action of his heart.

Samuel Beckett
David Levine

Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness. Eventually, after many vicissitudes, Murphy finds refuge in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (an asylum). Foreshadowing the title of Beckett’s second play Endgame, the novel ends with a game of chess between Murphy and Mr Endon in which Murphy resigns and then soon after dies, setting fire to himself in his lonely room and reducing himself to dust and oblivion.

A note on the text

Murphy was written in manuscript in six small exercise books over 10 months from mid-August 1935 to early June 1936. Beckett sent the typescript to his editor Charles Prentice at Chatto& Windus, the London publishers of Proust (1931) and a collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1933). After some inevitable prevarication, on 15 July 1936, Chatto turned Murphy down, followed by Heinemann on 4 August. The novel now entered the bleak limbo of serial rejection on both sides of the Atlantic, during the rest of 1936 and most of 1937. Occasionally, there were flurries of interest mixed with suggestions for the changes Beckett might do to his text to make the book more commercial. Beckett, however, refused to revise what he had written. Eventually, having returned to Paris, he heard on 9 December 1937 that, thanks to the recommendation of Jack Yeats, Murphy had been accepted by Routledge whose editor T Murray Ragg’s enthusiasm was subsequently confirmed by Herbert Read.

Then, echoing the random absurdism of his novel, on 7 January 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed in a Paris street when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp, named “Prudent”. Joyce arranged for medical treatment, and Beckett received his page proofs in hospital where he made a few alterations and insertions. Fifteen hundred copies were printed and Murphy went on sale on 7 March 1938 price 7s 6d. The reviews were mixed. Dylan Thomas, writing in the New English Weekly combined approval with criticism but did Beckett the favour of taking his work seriously. The Spectator’s critic wrote: “Rarely… have I been so entertained by a book, so tempted to superlatives and perhaps hyperboles of praise.” Predictably, the sales of Murphy were not good. Routledge records show 568 copies sold in 1938, 23 in 1939, 20 in 1940 and 7 in 1941. In March 1943, Murphy was allowed to go out of print.

Within months of publication, however, Beckett was hard at work translating his novel into French, partly to liberate his imagination from the shackles of the mother tongue, but mainly because his future seemed to lie in Paris. Then the war came, and the French translation would not be published until 1947 by Bordas, a publisher with whom Beckett subsequently fell out. Finally, after the success of En attendant Godot, Beckett’s main publishers, Editions de Minuit, took over the publication of Murphy and absorbed this edition into his oeuvre as a whole.

My reading of Murphy for this series has been based on the 2009 Faber & Faber edition, edited by Professor JCC Mays, a text derived from the first Routledge edition of 1938, but expertly corrected with reference to several typescript versions. None of the above should obscure the fact that Murphy is a deeply original, comic masterpiece by a giant of 20th-century European prose.