Hurry, Godot, Hurry

MURPHY (282 pp.)--Samuel Beckett--Grove Press ($3.50).

Few serious critics now suppose that Dublin-born Paris Expatriate Samuel Beckett is trying to pull their legs. What seems more likely with each book or play that comes along is that he is compulsively pulling at his own. In Waiting for Godot (TIME, April 30), playgoers left the theater sure of only one thing: Godot (God?) never showed up. But through their fuzzy, flavorsome big-and-small talk, through their palateless licking of life and lifelessness, the play's hopeless tramps left the impression that nothing would have happened even if Godot had appeared. In the novel Malone Dies (TIME, Oct. 15), Beckett's crippled hero was not even sure that his sordid life could be called living, and died a sordid death.

Then why go on reading Samuel Beckett? For one thing, because he can write; he gives his hopelessness a verbal dressing that prickles and surprises. For another, because his loss of hope cannot smother a flickering compassion. In Murphy, his latest novel to reach the U.S. (actually, Beckett's first), it is these tiny flames that survive the sad fate of the hero's ashes. The book was first published in England in 1938, and Beckett probably savored what happened next. It sold dismally, and the publisher's remaining stock was destroyed by a German bomb.

Sanctuary & Exile. Murphy is an amorphous Dubliner living in London who wants nothing in life except to escape it. He sees his own mind "as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without," and his best energies go into efforts to separate his mind from his body. This he does best when seated in an old rocker in which he ties himself naked before trying to rock himself into a state of nirvana. He lives, barely, from handouts ("Twopence the tea, twopence the biscuits, a perfectly balanced meal"). At the moment he is bedeviled by a need of the body; he has fallen in love with a prostitute. Unlike Murphy, Celia accepts life as it is. Her prescription for Murphy's doldrums and their unhappiness: a job.

His job, when he gets it, has been carefully chosen for him by Author Beckett: attendant in an insane asylum. Celia never sees him again. For among the insane, Murphy suddenly discovers that they have achieved what he had so long sought: to be in the world yet relieved from its pressures. He called "sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile."

Ashes & Anger. Murphy's tragedy now is that the insane do not really need him, and he can never jump the gap between his own hopeless world and theirs. When he dies in a fire in his garret room, even his last mocking wish is mocked. He had written a request to be cremated and his ashes flushed down a toilet bowl. Instead, they are thrown in anger during a bar brawl and scatter on the saloon floor, to be swept up with "the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit."

Author Beckett seems congenitally unable to break out of his circle of seedy despair--despite all his talent and his ability to furnish his novel with a richly ludicrous cast of raffish minor characters. Now 50, he is having a little trouble finding a producer for his new play. It is called End Game and two characters, Nagg and Nell, spend their time onstage snapping at each other from garbage cans. Yet who can tell? Even this may be a sign of hope in Beckett. For originally, it seems, he had intended two characters who spend the evening buried up to their necks in sand. This step from being buried alive to living amid refuse may represent progress, for after all, a man could always, by an act of will, climb out of his garbage can and go looking for Godot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.