Six Notebooks in Search of a Novel: A ‘First apercu’ of Beckett’s in Embryo

Abstract

is the same Ticklepenny [said Ticklepenny], but God bless my soul quantum mutatus'Ab illa, said Murphy.Beckett, Murphy1First emerges. With what directness and concreteness the same totality may be achieved appears [...].Beckett, Intercessions, by Denis DevlinThe purchase - at auction, by the University of Reading - of the six manuscript notebooks (five softback, but the first one with stiffened covers) in which Samuel Beckett wrote his first published novel Murphy meant that, once archival issues of conservation and access had been resolved, for the first time since 1936 it would be possible to evaluate how relatively early work of Beckett's was made into publishable entity some eighteen months later, after George Routledge & Co had put an end to the book's fruitless trek through the commissioning editors' offices of more than dozen London publishing imprints. Would it be case, to adapt Winnie's words from Happy Days, of: To have always been what I am - and so changed from what I was? (Beckett 1978, 66). Surely, in some sense it would have to be ... yet how far would it be possible or necessary to distinguish the ur-text from its familiar sibling? It was all very well to feel, with Kant (and perhaps also with Winnie), that the 'rule' of omnis determinatio est negatio (every determination is negation)2 would ultimately have to apply. At the same time there remained the possibility that these notebooks might on investigation prove to be as bizarrely various as the six notebooks in which, between 1941 and 1945, Beckett had written Watt. It was easy to forget Neary, in the published text of Murphy (chapter 10), describing repudiation of the as a purely intellectual operation of unspeakable difficulty (Beckett 2009a, 138), given the multiple ironies arising almost every time Neary is given the opportunity of opening his mouth. Yet it has been known for some little while that Murphy and Watt do not greatly resemble one another, and that the gestation of Watt was unusually long, hampered by hiding from the Gestapo in Roussillon (1942-44), and by Beckett's uncertainty as to how best to proceed, which with Watt led to many changes in conception and composition that had quite simply not been foreseen when the enterprise began. Murphy is - was - horse of very different colour, and the writing of it, leaving aside some later tinkering and some corrections, was essentially over by June 1936, roughly ten months after it had been begun. The manuscript shows that, as regards the total number of days of actually writing it - as distinct from thinking about it, planning it, and the like - it had actually occupied Beckett for only about the equivalent of three full months. This was not something that could be accurately deduced from Beckett's letters to Thomas MacGreevy during the writing of the book, even though some evidence of intermittent composition and self-doubt was easily enough to be inferred from them.However, even if one confines oneself to the letters to MacGreevy relating to Murphy as reproduced in the first volume of Beckett's Letters, it is fairly obvious that, to adopt musical terms as kind of analogy, the tempo of writing runs, roughly speaking: overture and beginners, presto, presto, prestissimo, presto... And then? Rather agonisingly: lento, lento, adagio, andante, coda. With the notebooks to hand this musical analogy can be pursued more accurately or, to change the metaphor, painted by numbers:Over the first 80 or so days on which Beckett could have continued to write his novel, once having begun it, he did so on about 75 of them;over the first 120 days only roughly tenth or so (about 12 days) were 'wasted,' other activities intervening, or corrections being made, the days between 23 August and 5 September 1935;over the next 200 days more than half the time the notebooks stayed shut, although some of them may have been used to try out corrections on the predominantly blank versos, almost none of which are dated. …