Murphy. Samuel Beckett

       Murphy

      WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

      Collected Poems in English and French

      The Collected Shorter Plays

      (All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,… but the clouds …, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)

      The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989

      (Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1-13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1-8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)

      Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

      Endgame and Act Without Words

      Ends and Odds

      First Love and Other Shorts

      Happy Days

      How It Is

      I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

      Krapp’s Last Tape

      (All That Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)

      Mercier and Camier Molloy

      More Pricks Than Kicks

      (Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)

      Murphy

      Nohow On

      (Company, 111 Seen 111 Said, Worstward Ho)

      The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett

      Rockaby and Other Short Plays

      (Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, All Strange Away, and A Piece of Monologue)

      The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett (boxed paperback set)

      Volume I: Novels

      (Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)

      Volume II: Novels

      (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,

      How It Is)

      Volume III: Dramatic Works

      Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism

      Stories and Texts for Nothing

      (The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1-13)

      Three Novels

      (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)

      Waiting for Godot

      Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition

      Watt

       Murphy

       Samuel Beckett

      Copyright © 1938 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett

      First published in English in 1938 by Routledge, London.

      The first Grove Press edition was published in 1957.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

       Design, composition, and textual supervision by Laura Lindgren

      Printed in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-6939

      eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9836-5

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

      841 Broadway

      New York, NY 10003

      DISTRIBUTED BY PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST

      WWW.GROVEATLANTIC.COM

       Murphy

       1

      The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

      He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin again for the billionth time. Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local movements were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the thongs. The breath was not perceptible. The eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice moulding, shrinking and fading. Somewhere a cuckoo-clock, having struck between twenty and thirty, became the echo of a street-cry, which now entering the mew gave Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo! directly.

      These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped. He wondered dimly what was breaking up his sunlight, what wares were being cried. Dimly, very dimly.

      He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind, as described in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.

      Murphy had lately studied under a man in Cork called Neary. This man, at that time, could stop his heart more or less whenever he liked and keep it stopped, within reasonable limits, for as long as he liked. This rare faculty, acquired after years of application somewhere north of the Nerbudda, he exercised frugally, reserving it for situations irksome beyond endurance, as when he wanted a drink and could not get one, or fell among Gaels and could not escape, or felt the pangs of hopeless sexual inclination.

      Murphy’s purpose in going to sit at Neary’s feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at that time a Pythagorean, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, auscultated, percussed, radiographed