Initial drafts of Murphy, up for auction next month, include extensive revisions as well as drawings of himself and James Joyce
In pictures: The Murphy manuscript
The "extraordinarily rich" manuscript of Samuel Beckett's first major novel Murphy, which has been glimpsed by only a very few individuals over the last half-century, is expected to fetch more than £1m when it goes up for auction next month.
Filling six notebooks, the Murphy manuscript – originally entitled Sasha Murphy – is packed with doodles and extensive corrections, including Beckett's lively sketches of his friend and mentor James Joyce, of himself, and of Charlie Chaplin, who went on to be an influence on the tramps in Waiting for Godot. The first 11 pages of text are entirely crossed out, and an insight into the workings of the Nobel prize-winning author's mind is provided by the eight cancelled versions of the novel's famous opening sentence. Beckett tried out "The sun shone, as only the sun can, on nothing new", working through various alternatives before ending up with: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
Written by Beckett between August 1935 and June 1936 and held by a private collector since the late 1960s, the Murphy manuscript is described by Sotheby's as "the most important Beckett manuscript ever to have been offered on the open market", and "capable of redefining Beckett studies for many years to come". The auction house has put a guide price of £800,000 to £1.2m on the manuscript, which is "substantially different" from the final version of the novel, published in 1938, and expects fierce interest from both institutions and private collectors.
"It's a very special thing," said manuscript specialist Dr Gabriel Heaton. "If you think what a major writer Beckett is, he has a global audience, and this is a very substantial manuscript of a tremendously important work - it's the sort of material which is very, very rare on the market, and the fact it has not been seen by scholars makes it even more exciting."
Heaton said the manuscript was a "very intimate object". "You do get such a strong sense of the mind at work, developing ideas, rewriting, doodling in the margins when he's stuck – and that's such a privilege when it's a mind like Beckett's," he said. "This is his first major work, and certainly the one in which you can see his themes emerging right the way through – his isolation, that wonderful mixture of philosophy and humour that is so distinctly Beckettian, the interest in poverty, the drab and everyday ugliness that totally transforms through his writing into something really quite beautiful."
The doodles of Joyce included in the textbooks, said Heaton, show how much the Ulysses author was on Beckett's mind. "They had been and remained really quite close, and he is struggling with Joyce's literary influence," said Heaton. "This novel is much more Joycean than anything he wrote later – he's doodling the face of a friend and mentor." Beckett expressed this himself, in a 1931 letter, when he wrote to a friend: "I vow I will get over JJ ere I die. Yessir."
Murphy tells of the eponymous hero's attempts to withdraw from reality and find peace in the "little world" of the mind. Set in London and Dublin, it sees Murphy urged by his prostitute lover Celia to find a job; he works in an asylum before immolating himself. Harold Bloom called it "deliciously unbelieving … the purest comedy that Beckett ever wrote".
Sotheby's said that despite the fits and starts with which Beckett began the novel, the "extraordinarily rich" manuscript shows that the "wonderful final chapter appears to have been written at a single sitting on 4 June [1936]". Sections showing heavy revisions, suggesting they were the portions of text to have given Beckett the most trouble, include the opening, Murphy's horoscope, and several of the passages at the boarding house on Brewery Road.
The auction house also pointed in its catalogue to other "small but significant" changes, "for example the seven scarves with which Murphy has bound himself naked into his rocking chair at the novel's opening were originally 'Seven immense handkerchiefs, all the colours of the rainbow', and [Murphy's friend] Neary's dislikes that lead him to stop his own heart include not 'Gaels' but 'persons discussing the Celtic twilight'."
Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature in 1969 for "writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". Murphy was published years before his best known work, the 1953 play Waiting for Godot, and followed a difficult route to publication. It was rejected more than 40 times by publishers following its completion in 1936: Chatto told the author that "the novel racket has reached such a pass today that a book, such as yours, which makes real demands on the reader's intelligence and general knowledge has less chance than ever of gaining a hearing", and Beckett responded to the demand from Houghton Mifflin that substantial cuts be made with the suggestion: "Take every 500th word, punctuate carefully and publish a poem in prose in the Paris Daily Mail. Then the rest separately and privately … as the ravings of a schizoid."
Routledge picked it up, eventually, in December 1937, with editor Thomas Ragg saying that he "enjoyed it immensely. I want to publish it … it is far too good to be a big popular or commercial success … [but] will bring great joy to the few."
Heaton said the manuscript was "probably the most significant manuscript of a complete novel by any British or Irish writer of the modern era to come to the open market in many, many decades".
• The manuscript will be on display to the public at Sothebys in New York from June 5 to 10, Dublin on June 17 and London on July 9 and 10.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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