Murphy

Beckett finished writing Murphy in June 1936. After 40 rejections by publishers, it was finally accepted in December 1937. At the time, the editor accepting Murphy said, “it is far too good to be a big popular or commercial success … [but] will bring great joy to the few.” The influential Herbert Read, commenting on the novel after the contract had been signed, said it was “a perfect example of surrealist humour. It is very funny and at the same time very grim”. Initial sales were poor, yielding a negligible income for its author. Seventy-seven years later, the six notebooks that made up the novel’s handwritten draft were bought by The Beckett International Foundation at Reading University for £962,500.

Beckett’s famous first sentence for the novel lasts well:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Being able to see from those expensive notebooks that Beckett had eight runs at that opener before landing on those exact ten words, almost justifies that price alone. That the eleven pages that followed were all entirely crossed out before Beckett properly got under way is supporting evidence. And undoubtedly what followed was indeed both surreal and grim. Connor calls the novel a “grimly self-annulling anti-novel”.

Murphy was Beckett’s first published novel (in English), Watt (separate post, this site) being his second and last (before turning to French as his working language). It is a curious beast, although slim at less than two hundred pages. Coming to it after multiple readings of Watt and Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (also this site), one’s predominant impression is of experimentation. Whether it is either dotty (to use A. Alvarez’s favourite adjective for Murphy and Watt) or utterly deranged is open to question.

Guy Davenport’s illustration of Samuel Beckett’s character Murphy

The eponymous hero, holed up in London’s bedsit land, is surrounded by a crowd of characters. Banteringly tangential dialogue abounds. Cryptic communication is baffling and from this Murphy retreats to his solipsistic rocking chair, ties himself in, naked, and attains in his “little world” of the human mind a form of equilibrial stasis that is impossible for him in the “big world” outside it. Murphy’s desire to separate his mind from his body, dotty though his means of accomplishing this may seem, move beyond meditation into metaphysics.

As these peculiarities unfold, it is difficult to ignore the biographical resonances that are established between Murphy and the author. Murphy’s eyes, we learn, are twice described as “cold and unwavering as a gull’s” (pages 5 and 31). (If this doesn’t ring a bell, check out Jane Bown’s famous photograph of Beckett.) Further on, the object of Murphy’s love, the prostitute Celia (s’il y a), entreats Murphy to find work so that she no longer has to practice hers, which could well be reminiscent of Beckett’s mother’s entreaties to her son who had turned his back on a position with Trinity College, Dublin, preferring instead to embark on a footloose and freelance form of academe and scholarship. When Murphy eventually finds employment - at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (asylum, subsequently referred to as “MMM”), he sleeps in a garret, calling to mind the one Beckett slept in in Hanover. Not that this relationship between text and life is unique; perhaps a novel would be exceptional if it didn’t exhibit such autobiographical reflections.

Narratives disrupted in Murphy

The experimentation we find in Murphy takes several forms, one of which is disrupted narrative. Beckett refines this in Watt (1945), but here in Murphy are its first stirrings. On page 19 Celia mentions that she has “it”, which transpires some six pages later to be a “life-warrant”, a horoscope that Murphy had gained, quoted in full on page 26, (then referred back to some forty pages later where Murphy was made to feel confident by the “delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven”). The reader needs to page flip back and forth to anchor these references. Again at the end of chapter 5 Murphy finds Celia prostrate - and “a shocking thing had happened”. Readers turning to chapter 6 expect this to be explained. They are disappointed, for chapter 6 is, instead, a “bulletin” on Murphy’s mind, which Beckett ends by saying, “This painful duty having now been discharged, no further bulletins will be issued”. It is not until chapter 8, some 18 pages later are we told that old man Willoughby had suffered a misadventure.

This elastication of Beckett’s narrative, rather than increasing suspense, serves to diminish the lived significance of the novel’s supporting characters. They are more like players used to establish an emerging philosophy than characters in a literary tale, placeholders for theorems and experiments. And, of course, the rest of the book - as with everything up to this point - is about Murphy’s mind, a disruptive affair in itself, bulletins or no. In a letter written just after he finished Murphy, Beckett had practically declared his predilection with literary sabotage.

As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (DISJECTA, p.172)

The debt owed by the author to Joyce, for whom Beckett worked in Paris as a sort of secretary in the late 1920s and early 1930s, is also clear. Beckett read to Joyce, compensating for the latter’s deteriorating eyesight, and occasionally took dictation from him. The two became friends, and the influence on Beckett cannot be underestimated. As Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson remarks: “the basic impetus in his [Beckett’s] early writing remained accretive and accumulative, just as Joyce’s art was based on absorbing everything into itself” (Knowlson, p. 106). Thus the denseness of Murphy is one of its chief characteristics. Erudition, often way beyond what can be reasonably expected of a reader to absorb unaided, abounds. The territory is Joycean, and the effect for the unscholarly reader is questionable - impressive or dismissible. The texture is self-referential for sure which, far from giving the fiction narrative integrity, lends it further disruption. Making sense of it, readers reach for reference books. This degree of learning sometimes gets in the way.

Permutations and chess in Murphy

In Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable Beckett’s play with Cartesian permutations attains full flight. Here in Murphy the unveiling is slow and one wonders for a while whether it will even show up. But that delight arrives on page 68 when Murphy becomes absorbed with finishing his lunch, lain out in front of him on the lawn near the Cockpit.

Murphy has five biscuits which he carefully takes out of a packet: “a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre, and one anonymous”. The humour is in the pedantry. “He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it the best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable”, we are told, siding with many of his readers who might adopt the same strategy - you do, don’t you? The “order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him and varied irregularly from day to day”. Murphy is then struck by the “paltry” nature of this arrangement and establishes that if he did not insist on eating the anonymous biscuit first, he would up the permutations from 6 to 24. If he then dropped his insistence on eating the ginger biscuit last, he would up the count to a “radiant” 120. (For the curious, as you would expect of me, I have provided the permutations below.)

Far from being merely an intellectual game for Murphy, it positively transports him beyond the quotidian:

Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as of the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other. (Murphy, p.69)

In what must be seen as a classic pirouette by Beckett, Murphy is distracted out of his reverie by a passer-by, whose dog he is asked to hold. Obliging, but diverted from his lunch, Murphy finds that the dachshund Nelly has scoffed his biscuits “with the exception of the Ginger”, and no further mention is made of the revelation of the permutations. When Beckett subsequently extended this examination in Molly in 1947, it ran to a magisterial six pages in which the eponymous hero established a sequence in which to suck sixteen stones, provisioning different pockets with them in order to arrive at an optimum permutation:

And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed. It was a wild part of the coast. I don’t remember having been seriously molested … (Molloy, p.74)

That Beckett employs a dog to dispense with the objects of permutation in Murphy and upgrades this to the eponymous hero himself in Molloy provides more clarity to the significance of all these calculations. It is the process not the result that matters. Biscuits are as unimportant as stones. All are dispensable. The insanity of engaging in the exercise is what matters.

There is a further Cartesian reductio ad absurdum exercise when Murphy realises, after his chess game with Mr. Endon (see below), that the patient had given him the slip. When Murphy tracks him down, he finds Mr. Endon outside “the hypermaniac’s” padded cell, playing with the indicator, a device outside a cell that records the visit of a nurse, sending the time-stamp of its use to the supervisor’s switchboard in order to prove that a ward round had been properly completed by the duty staff:

Murphy found him in the south transept … ringing the changes on the various ways in which the indicator could be pressed and the light turned on and off. Beginning with the light turned off to begin with he had: lit, indicated, extinguished; lit, extinguished, indicated; indicated, lit, extinguished. Continuing then with the light turned on to begin with he had: extinguished, lit, indicated; extinguished, indicated, lit; indicated, extinguished and was seriously thinking of lighting when Murphy stayed his hand. The hypermaniac bounced off the walls like a bluebottle in a jar. (Murphy, p.169)

That Mr. Endon, an asylum patient, a ‘catatonic’, gained something from enumerating these feverish permutations connects him to Murphy, his biscuit-arranging nurse. That the ill and the supposedly well share the same crackpot behaviour suggests that no-one in Beckett’s world is immune from an all-pervading, existential pointlessness. Just that while it lasts one best find humour in it.

This much is confirmed when, shortly after, Beckett lets us appreciate that the supervisor, Bom (who has a twin brother called Bim and an uncle called Bum), saw on his switchboard the “unprecedented distribution of visits” (to the hyponmaniac’s cell), which baffled “his ingenuity up to and including the day of his death”. He rounds this off nicely:

And the Magdalen Mental Merceyseat remembers Murphy to this day, with pity, derision, contempt and a touch of awe, as the male nurse that went mad with his colours nailed to the mast. (Murphy, p.169)

One need look little further than this short episode to find all the essential ingredients of Beckett’s unique vision. Ludicrously obsessive permutations suggest pointlessness; an ironic questioning of who it is that belongs on which side of the sane-insane divide; humour that transforms this from the grim to the genuinely funny; and a style of delivery that dances with a cadence of pelucid calm.

Chess offered Murphy and Mr. Endon a neutral plane on which to meet - and Mr. Endon an occasion to give the diverted Murphy the slip. The game was arguably a key source of Beckett’s fascination with permutation. Machine computation, not available to Beckett, apparently tells us that:

after both players move, 400 possible board setups exist. After the second pair of turns, there are 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million.
(FYI: How Many Different Ways Can a Chess Game Unfold? by Natalie Wolchover, Popular Science, December 2010)

Becket would not have recognised these numbers, but he would have been familiar with the general proposition. He was taught chess by his older brother Frank, and Knowlson relates how Beckett enjoyed playing with their uncle Howard, who participated in a celebrated match defeat in Dublin (with several concurrent opponents) of the Cuban diplomat Capablana y Graupera who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. The game was a lifelong passion, enjoyed with any player Beckett could find. A notable one, at around the time when he was writing Murphy, was the artist Marcel Duchamp, who subsequently went on to develop an interest in the game at a theoretical level. (Duchamp co-authored a treatise describing the Lasker-Reichhelm position, a rare chess endgame scenario.) Beckett used Duchamp’s endgame theme in his own 1957 play Endgame. (This is but one of the many, many rabbit holes into which one can tumble when engaging with Beckett.)

In the game that is Murphy’s penultimate act in the novel, played with the patient Mr Endon, Beckett sets out all the moves, to some of which he appends comments using formal ‘algebraic chess notation’ (pages 165-7). It is a classic, often cited in chess literature. Readers, like myself, not sufficiently adept at following chess games laid out this way can ‘play’ the Murphy/Endon game on an interactive page on Chess.com.

What unfolds during the game is a broad trashing of chess conventions, matching the literary ones that Beckett had his sights on within the novel itself. The players’ moves are designed less to gain advantage than to delay or avoid it as they perform a dance for themselves and to each other. Ten or so of Murphy’s 43 moves mirror those of Mr Endon’s previous moves. A third of the total moves repeat ones previously made by one or other of them. Some are merely forwards and backwards lunge-and-parries with no tactical meaning. Indeed, opportunities for taking are flagrantly ignored, so much so that after 86 moves no pieces are taken, and Murphy retires “with fool’s mate in his soul”. The commentary Beckett provides on various moves clearly parodies write-ups of chess games, for example, where a pointless slide of Mr Endon’s king to QB1 is “Exquisitely played”, and his knight to QR1 is tagged with “Black now has an irresistible game” when neither move achieves anything in the traditional sense. Words no longer convey their traditional meaning, just as Duchamp’s male urinal is by no means a “Fountain”. This is genuinely surreal - and very funny. In Beckett’s fictional world the strict rules that the game of chess requires of players are conformed to punctiliously by Murphy and Mr. Endon, but their pursuance to gain advantage is ignored entirely. This rejection of conventions liberates the players.

Beckett’s suggestion that the book’s cover should have displayed a photograph of two apes playing chess was not taken up (Knowlson p.209). Had it been, it might have helped readers position themselves for the ensuing literary experiments.

Bethlem Royal Hospital which Samuel Beckett visited in 1935

Murphy and a slap-up psychosis

Beckett’s interest in mental illness and psychoanalysis was informed by his own experiences. He had undergone therapy at the Tavistock Clinic for two years just before settling to write the novel, and later visited the Bethlem Royal Hospital where his friend Dr. Geoffrey Thompson worked as Senior House Physician. (Knowlson helpfully tells us that the book blurb for early versions of Murphy that stated Beckett worked there as a nurse was inaccurate in that respect.) These interests steer Murphy into that territory. That Beckett’s character eventually gains employment in the so-called fictionalised version of this new Bedlam, the MMM, is no accident. Murphy sees in the patients parts of himself:

The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing more fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. (Murphy, p.123)

In these cadenced phrases, Murphy’s situation is clarified. Beckett follows this in the same paragraph with a broader philosophical framework:

In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (Murphy, p.124)

This translates to “where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing”. Seventeenth century ascetic follower of Descartes, Geulincx’s influence in Beckett’s vision of Murphy is to take things so far to their extremes that Murphy’s humility consists of inaction (as only a deity can be responsible for action). Murphy’s abnegation of responsibility and retreat into solipsism is the logical result of a philosophy not tempered by bodily needs. He lapses “into consciousness”, as if the world in which the rest of us live is an error, a fall. Yet as Beckett adds here, “These dispositions and others ancillary, pressing every available means (e.g. the rocking-chair) into their service, could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it.” ‘Clinching it’ appears to arise through Murphy’s engagement with the patients at the MMM (with the additional and wry linkage to the Bim, Bom, Bum characters who work there, whose surname is Clinch). Murphy’s own chair-bondage (from which his garret skylight at night is a “galactic coalsack”), the padded cells into which the patients were put (prefiguring much of Beckett’s later prose work), and his success with patients are all key in this.

The coherence of Murphy’s modus vivendi becomes increasingly evident as the novel progresses. His rocking achieves nothing in the external ‘big’ world. His planned biscuit-consumption is ordered but unconsummated, so to speak. His game of chess with Mr. Endon achieves nothing (in conventional terms). His death by combustion (as the jerry-rigged gas feed to the unlit heater in his candlelit garret is mistaken by an unseen hand for a cistern chain on the floor below) is the ultimate erasure of potential. The eventual fate for his ashes (contrary to the instructions he had previously willed) is that they are flushed into the gutter. His “body, mind and soul”, so carefully separated in his life’s rocking, end up “freely distributed” in the posthumous sweepings from a bar room floor. Are these all peterings out, at once pointless - worthless in a Geulincxian sense - and yet triumphs of the ‘little’ world that never made sense of what lay outside it in the ‘big’ one, because full-time tenure of the former constitutes the insanity to which Murphy aspired. Herbert Read was right: it is very grim.

He was also right that it is very funny, which seems to be the very point of the novel, its very aim. Beckett’s own triumph in Murphy seems to be that these two conditions can co-exist, the one neither negating nor dominating the other.

“Patients”, we are told with a deadpan tone, left Murphy’s ward of the MMM “better, dead or chronic, for a convalescent house, the mortuary or the exit”. When Beckett details how Murphy is “loudly abused by Bom for his clumsiness in handling things (trays, beds, thermometers, syringes, pans, jackets, spatulas, screws etc.)” and was “silently commended for his skill in handling the patients themselves” our imagination is seeded with a sequence of well-lit vignettes. The maladroit handling of these asylum objects is hilarious, notably the screw which no doubt had metaphorically come loose from one of the patients - or even Murphy himself. A silent commendation is exquisite. That Murphy labours more diligently because he notices how the “higher schizoids” in the MMM retain an “absolute impassiveness … in the face of the most pitiless therapeutic bombardment” is confirmation that Beckett’s empathy for the mentally ill is genuine and means that his finding humour in this - the “slap-up psychosis” - is a form of laughing with them rather than at them. From an author with a well-documented reputation for kindness, we would expect no less. It is therefore hard not to feel some affection both for the bravura that runs throughout Murphy and for its doomed and dotty anti-hero.

A footnote about Murphy’s five biscuits

Thanks to the Maths is Fun page on combinations and permutations, we can see the exacting permutations that Beckett had Murphy establish for the sequence, discussed above, in which he might eat his five different biscuits. Insisting on eating the ginger biscuit last, there were 24 possible ways of ordering his consuming of the biscuits. On that web page, set names to objects, both n and r to 4, and object position to Yes and unlimited supply to No for the result to be 24:

As Murphy decides to “overcome his infatuation with the ginger”, the “assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!” To achieve this, on the same Maths is Fun page, set both n and r to 5, with everything else unchanged, and here they are:

[Murphy by Samuel Beckett is available in the UK from Hive.co.uk.]

Links

• Chess in Literature: Murphy vs. Mr. Endon in ‘Murphy’ by Samuel Beckett; an animated version that cross-references Beckett’s accompanying annotations.
• The “Murphy” Manuscript at Reading University’s Beckett International Foundation.
• Just Visiting 2: Samuel Beckett; the author visited Bethlem and played chess with Doctor Thompson, Bethlem’s Junior House Physician.
• Beckett, Duchamp and Chess: A Crossroads at Arcachon in the Summer of 1940by Harry Vandervlist

Reading list

• A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett; Viking Press, 1973.
• Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography; Vintage/Ebury, 1978.
• Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit; Calder and Boyars, 1970.
• Samuel Beckett, Murphy; Jupiter Books, 1963.
• Samuel Beckett, Watt; Calderbook, 1976.
• Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable; Calder and Boyars, 1973.
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Faber and Faber, 1968.
• Samuel Beckett, How It Is; Calder and Boyars, 1964.
• Samuel Beckett, Poems in English; Calder and Boyers, 1968.
• Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine; Calder and Boyars, 1971.
• Samuel Beckett, DISJECTA: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment; John Calder Ltd, 1983.
• Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose edited by Mark Nixon; Faber and Faber Ltd, 2010.
• J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays 2006 - 2017;Vintage, 2018.
• Steven Connor, Beckett and Bion; http://stevenconnor.com/beckbion.html.
• Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study; Grove Press, 1961.
• Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett; W.H. Allen, 1964, (illustrated by Guy Davenport)
• Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett; Thames and Hudson, 1973.
• James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett; Bloomsbury, 1996.
• A.J. Leventhal (Ed.), Beckett at Sixty: a Festschrift; Calder and Boyers,1967.
• Vivian Mercier, Beckett / Beckett; Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Christopher Murray (Ed.), Samuel Beckett: Playwright and Poet; Pegasus Books, 2009.
• Rubin Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction; University of Illinois Press, 1984.
• Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing; Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
• Dirk Van Hulle (Ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett; Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Katharine Worth (Ed.), Beckett the Shape Changer: a Symposium; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Related posts on this site

• How It Is by Samuel Beckett
• Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
• Watt by Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett’s hands