Murphy

by Samuel Beckett

  Thus this sixpence worth of sky, from the ludicrous broadsheet that Murphy had called his life-warrant, his bull of incommunication and corpus of deterrents, changed into the poem that he alone of the living could write. He drew out the black envelope, grasped it to tear it across, then put it back in his pocket, mindful of his memory, and that he was not alone. He said he would present himself at the M.M.M. the following Sunday morning, whenever that was, which would give Ticklepenny time to manure the ground. Ticklepenny would not go mad before that day of rest so favourable to Murphy. To those in fear of losing it, reason stuck like a bur. And to those in hope …?

  ‘Call me Austin,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘or even Augustin.’ He felt the time was hardly ripe for Gussy, or even Gus.

  Having now been seated for over an hour without any ill effects, carried through his daily fraud and found a use for a pot poet, Murphy felt he had earned the long rapture flat on his back in that most pleasant of natural laps available, the Cockpit in Hyde Park. The need for this had been steadily increasing, now in a final spasm of urgency it tore him away from Ticklepenny, into the Gray’s Inn Road. Under the table the legs continued to fawn, as a fowl to writhe long after its head has been removed, on a void place and a spacious nothing.

  Vera, remarking that he did not call at the cash-desk on his way out and that his bill lay where she had put it, supposed the onus of payment to have fallen on the friend. However she made quite sure that it would not fall on her by putting the two bills together when she made out the second. All this happened as Murphy had foreseen. The comfort he had been to Ticklepenny was dirt cheap at fourpence.

  Half the filth thus saved went on a bus to the Marble Arch. He told the conductor to tell him when they got there, so that he might close his eyes and keep them closed. This cancelled the magnate in Oxford Street, but what were magnates to a man whose future was assured? And as for the Harpy Tomb, by closing his eyes he could be in an archaic world very much less corrupt than anything on view in the B.M. Crawling and jerking along in the bus he tried to think of Celia’s face when she heard of the engagement, he even tried to think of the engagement itself, but his skull felt packed with gelatine and he could not think of anything.

  Murphy adored many things, to think of him as sad or blasé would be to do him an injustice or too much honour. One of the many things that he adored was a ride in one of the new six-wheelers when the traffic was at its height. The deep oversprung seats were most insidious, especially forward. A staple recreation before Celia had been to wait at Walham Green for a nice number eleven and take it through the evening rush to Liverpool Street and back, sitting downstairs behind the driver on the near side. But now with Celia to support, and Miss Carridge making her own of his uncle’s interests, this pleasure lay beyond his means.

  Near the Cockpit a guffawing group was watching Rima being cleaned of a copious pollution of red permanganate. Murphy receded a little way into the north and prepared to finish his lunch. He took the biscuits carefully out of the packet and laid them face upward on the grass, in order as he felt of edibility. They were the same as always, a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous. 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. The order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him and varied irregularly from day to day. On his knees now before the five it struck him for the first time that these prepossessions reduced to a paltry six the number of ways in which he could make this meal. But this was to violate the very essence of assortment, this was red permanganate on the Rima of variety. Even if he conquered his prejudice against the anonymous, still there would be only twenty-four ways in which the biscuits could be eaten. But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!

  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. Lying beside them on the grass but facing the opposite way, wrestling with the demon of gingerbread, he heard the words:

  ‘Would you have the goodness, pardon the intrusion, to hold my little doggy?’

  Seen from above and behind Murphy did look fairly obliging, the kind of stranger one’s little doggy would not mind being held by. He sat up and found himself at the feet of a low-sized corpulent middle-aged woman with very bad duck’s disease indeed.

  Duck’s disease is a distressing pathological condition in which the thighs are suppressed and the buttocks spring directly from behind the knees, aptly described in Steiss’s nosonomy as Panpygoptosis. Happily its incidence is small and confined, as the popular name suggests, to the weaker vessel, a bias of Nature bitterly lamented by the celebrated Dr. Busby and other less pedantic notables. It is non-contagious (though some observers have held the contrary), non-infectious, non-heritable, painless and intractable. Its ætiology remains obscure to all but the psychopathological wholehogs, who have shown it to be simply another embodiment of the neurotic Non me rebus sed mihi res.

  The Duck, to give her a name to go on with, held in one hand a large bulging bag and in the other a lead whereby her personality was extended to a Dachshund so low and so long that Murphy had no means of telling whether it was a dog or a bitch, which was the first thing he always wanted to know about every so-called dog that came before him. It certainly had the classical bitch’s eye, kiss me in the cornea, keep me in the iris and God help you in the pupil. But some dogs had that.

  Murphy’s front did not bear out the promise of his rear, but the Duck had gone too far to draw back.

  ‘Nelly is in heat,’ she said, without the least trace of affectation, in a voice both proud and sad, and paused for Murphy to congratulate or condole, according to his lights. When he did neither she simply laid down her hand.

  ‘The oui-ja board is how I live, I come all the way from Paddington to feed the poor dear sheep and now I dare not let her off, here is my card, Rosie Dew, single woman, by appointment to Lord Gall of Wormwood, perhaps you know him, a charming man, he sends me objects, he is in a painful position, spado of long standing in tail male special he seeks testamentary pentimenti from the au-delà, how she strains to be off and away, the protector is a man of iron and will not bar, plunge the fever of her blood in the Serpentine or the Long Water for that matter, like Shelley’s first wife you know, her name was Harriet was it not, not Nelly, Shelley, Nelly, oh Nelly how I ADORE you.’

  Shortening her hold on the lead she whipped up Nelly with great dexterity into the wilds of her bosom and covered her snout with all the kisses that Nelly had taught her in the long evenings. She then handed the trembling animal to Murphy, took two heads of lettuce out of the bag and began sidling up to the sheep.

  The sheep were a miserable-looking lot, dingy, close-cropped, undersized and misshapen. They were not cropping, they were not ruminating, they did not even seem to be taking their ease. They simply stood, in an attitude of profound dejection, their heads bowed, swaying slightly as though dazed. Murphy had never seen stranger sheep, they seemed one and all on the point of collapse. They made the exposition of Wordsworth’s lovely ‘fields of sleep’ as a compositor’s error for ‘fields of sheep’ seem no longer a jibe at that most excellent man. They had not the strength to back away from Miss Dew approaching with the lettuce.

  She moved freely among them, tendering the lettuce to one after another, pressing it up into their sunk snouts with the gesture of one feeding sugar to a horse. They turned their broody heads aside from the emetic, bringing them back into alignment as soon as it passed from them. Miss Dew strayed further and further afield in her quest for a sheep to eat her lettuce.

  Murphy had been too ab
sorbed in this touching little argonautic, and above all in the ecstatic demeanour of the sheep, to pay any attention to Nelly. He now discovered that she had eaten all the biscuits with the exception of the Ginger, which cannot have remained in her mouth for more than a couple of seconds. She was seated after her meal, to judge by the infinitesimal angle that her back was now making with the horizon. There is this to be said for Dachshunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie. If Parmigianino had gone in for painting dogs, he would have painted them like Nelly.

  Miss Dew was now experimenting with quite a new technique. This consisted in placing her offering on the ground and withdrawing to a discreet remove, so that the sheep might separate in their minds, if that was what they wanted, the ideas of the giver and the gift. Miss Dew was not Love, that she could feel one with what she gave, and perhaps there was some dark ovine awareness of this, that Miss Dew was not lettuce, holding up the entire works. But a sheep’s psychology is far less simple than Miss Dew had any idea, and the lettuce masquerading as a natural product of the park met with no more success than when presented frankly as an exotic variety.

  Miss Dew at last was obliged to admit defeat, a bitter pill to have to swallow before a perfect stranger. She picked up the two heads of lettuce and came trundling back on her powerful little legs to where Murphy was sitting on his heels, bemoaning his loss. She stood beside him too abashed to speak, whereas he was too aggrieved not to.

  ‘The sheep,’ he said, ‘may not fancy your cabbage—’

  ‘Lettuce!’ cried Miss Dew. ‘Lovely fresh clean white crisp sparkling delicious lettuce!’

  ‘But your hot dog has eaten my lunch,’ said Murphy, ‘or as much of it as she could stomach.’

  Miss Dew went down on her knees just like any ordinary person and took Nelly’s head in her hands. Mistress and bitch exchanged a long look of intelligence.

  ‘The depravity of her appetite,’ said Murphy, ‘you may be glad to hear, does not extend to ginger, nor the extremity of mine to a rutting cur’s rejectamenta.’

  Miss Dew kneeling looked more than ever like a duck, or a stunted penguin. Her bosom rose and fell, her colour came and went, in consequence of Murphy’s reference to Nelly, who with Lord Gall was almost all she had in this dreary en-deçà, as a rutting cur. Her pet had certainly placed her in a very false position.

  Wylie in Murphy’s place might have consoled himself with the thought that the Park was a closed system in which there could be no loss of appetite; Neary with the unction of an Ipse dixit; Ticklepenny with reprisal. But Murphy was inconsolable, the snuff of the dip stinking that the biscuits had lit in his mind, for Nelly to extinguish.

  ‘Oh, my America,’ he cried, ‘my Newfoundland, no sooner sighted than Atlantis.’

  Miss Dew pictured her patron in her place.

  ‘How much are you out?’ she said.

  These words were incomprehensible to Murphy, and remained so until he saw a purse in her hand.

  ‘Twopence,’ he replied, ‘and a critique of pure love.’

  ‘Here is threepence,’ said Miss Dew.

  This brought Murphy’s filth up to fivepence.

  Miss Dew went away without saying goodbye. She had not left home more gladly than she now returned sadly. It was often the way. She trundled along towards Victoria Gate, Nelly gliding before her, and felt the worse for her outing. Her lettuce turned down, her mortification, her pet and herself in her pet insulted, the threepence gone that she had earmarked for a glass of mild. She passed by the dahlias and the dogs’ cemetery, out into the sudden grey glare of Bayswater Road. She caught up Nelly in her arms and carried her a greater part of the way to Paddington than was necessary. A boot was waiting for her from Lord Gall, a boot formerly in the wardrobe of his father. She would sit down with Nelly in her lap, one hand on the boot, the other on the board, and wrest from the ether some good reason for the protector, who was also the reversioner unfortunately, to cut off the cruel entail.

  Miss Dew’s control, a panpygoptotic Manichee of the fourth century, Lena by name, severe of deportment and pallid of feature, who had entertained Jerome on his way through Rome from Calchis to Bethlehem, had not, according to her own account, been raised so wholly a spiritual body as yet to sit down with much more comfort than she had in the natural. But she declared that every century brought a marked improvement and urged Miss Dew to be of good courage. In a thousand years she might look forward to having thighs like anyone else, and not merely thighs, but thighs celestial.

  Miss Dew was no ordinary hack medium, her methods were original and eclectic. She might not be able to bring down torrents of ectoplasm or multiply anemones from her armpits, but left undisturbed with one hand on a disaffected boot, the other on the board, Nelly in her lap and Lena coming through, she could make the dead softsoap the quick in seven languages.

  Murphy continued to sit on his heels for some little time, playing with the five pennies, speculating on Miss Dew, speculating on the sheep with whom he felt in close sympathy, deprecating this prejudice and that, arraigning his love of Celia. In vain. The freedom of indifference, the indifference of freedom, the will dust in the dust of its object, the act a handful of sand let fall – these were some of the shapes he had sighted, sunset landfall after many days. But now all was nebulous and dark, a murk of irritation from which no spark could be excogitated. He therefore went to the other extreme, disconnected his mind from the gross importunities of sensation and reflection and composed himself on the hollow of his back for the torpor he had been craving to enter for the past five hours. He had been unavoidably detained, by Ticklepenny, by Miss Dew, by his efforts to rekindle the light that Nelly had quenched. But now there seemed nothing to stop him. Nothing can stop me now, was his last thought before he lapsed into consciousness, and nothing will stop me. In effect, nothing did turn up to stop him and he slipped away, from the pensums and prizes, from Celia, chandlers, public highways, etc., from Celia, buses, public gardens, etc., to where there were no pensums and no prizes, but only Murphy himself, improved out of all knowledge.

  When he came to, or rather from, how he had no idea, he found night fallen, a full moon risen and the sheep gathered round him, a drift of pale uneasy shapes, suggesting how he might have been roused. They seemed in rather better form, less Wordsworthy, resting, ruminating and even cropping. What they had rejected was therefore not Miss Dew, nor her cabbage, but simply the hour of day. He thought of the four caged owls in Battersea Park, whose joys and sorrows did not begin till dusk.

  He bared his eyes to the moon, he forced back the lids with his fingers, the yellow oozed under them into his skull, a belch came wet and foul from the green old days—

  Gazed on unto my setting from my rise

  Almost of none but of unquiet eyes—,

  He spat, rose and hastened back to Celia, with all the speed that fivepence could command. No doubt his news was good, according to her God, but it had been a trying day for Murphy in the body and he was more than usually impatient for the music to begin. It was long past his usual hour when he arrived, to find, not a meal spoiling as he had hoped and feared, but Celia spreadeagled on her face on the bed.

  A shocking thing had happened.

  6

  Amor intellectualis quo murphy se ipsum amat.

  IT is most unfortunate, but the point of this story has been reached where a justification of the expression ‘Murphy’s mind’ has to be attempted. Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was – that would be an extravagance and an impertinence – but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be. Murphy’s mind is after all the gravamen of these informations. A short section to itself at this stage will relieve us from the necessity of apologising for it further.

  Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that
it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.

  This did not involve Murphy in the idealist tar. There was the mental fact and there was the physical fact, equally real if not equally pleasant.

  He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental experience only. Thus the form of kick was actual, that of caress virtual.

  The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo. The mental experience was cut off from the physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the agreement of part of its content with physical fact did not confer worth on that part. It did not function and could not be disposed according to a principle of worth. It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. It contained forms with parallel in another mode and forms without, but not right forms and wrong forms. It felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was now to be in the light, now in the half light, now in the dark. That was all.

  Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed from the other. He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one. Perhaps the knowledge was related to the fact of the kick as two magnitudes to a third. Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-mental non-physical Kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick in intellectu and the kick in re. But where then was the supreme Caress?