In March 1951, Les éditions de Minuit, a small, financially insecure Paris-based publishing house, released a new novel with the decidedly un-French title Molloy. On the verso facing the title page, the publisher listed five other works by the same author: three novels. Murphy, Malone meurt (Malone Dies) and L'Innommable (The Unnamable), and two plays, Eleutheria and En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot). With the exception of Murphy, however, all of these works were identified as forthcoming. As for the author of so much unpublished material, Samuel Beckett was known at the time only to a small circle of other European writers, painters and intellectuals, his principal publications – a short monograph on Marcel Proust (1931), a collections of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and the novel Murphy (1938; French translation 1947) – having attracted some favourable reviews but few readers. That reputation was to be transformed irrevocably by the publication of Molloy, followed by Malone meurt in November of the same year and L'Innommable two years later, together with the full stage production of Godot in January 1953.[1] Indeed, by 1953 French reviewers were regularly placing Beckett in the company of some of the major writers of the century, including Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Camus.
For a sense of the critical affirmation with which Molloy was received in France, one need look no further than the 'press opinions' displayed in an éditions de Minuit advertisement printed in the Winter 1952–3 issue of Merlin, an English-language literary magazine published in Paris, the editors of which were to be instrumental in the publication of the subsequent English translation of Molloy by the Olympia Press in 1955. The advertisement includes the following critical judgements on the novel: 'One of the most significant works to appear since the war' (Jean Blanzat, Le Figaro littéraire); 'Rarely since Kafka and Joyce have we experienced such … poetic depth' (Max-Pol Fouchet, Carrefour); 'Molloy is the expression of reality stripped of inessentials' (Georges Bataille); 'Molloy places Beckett certainly among the greatest writers' (Maurice Nadeau, Mercure de France). To these judgements may be added the claim with which the American critic Richard Seaver opened his essay on Beckett in the Autumn 1952 issue of Merlin: 'Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer long established in France, has recently published two novels which, although they defy all commentary, merit the attention of anyone interested in this century's literature.'[2]
Begun in Ireland on 2 May 1947 and completed in France only six months later, on 1 November 1947, Molloy belongs with a number of other major prose and dramatic works written by Beckett between 1946 and 1951, including not only those listed as forthcoming in the first edition of Molloy but also four long stories (all written in 1946) and thirteen short texts (written in 1950–1, after the completion of L'Innommable), published together as Nouvelles et Textes pour rien in 1955. This remarkable 'frenzy of writing' – as Beckett was to describe it[3] – commenced in February 1946, with the story La Fin (The End), which was begun in English and completed in French. Beckett himself suggested that 'the siege in the room' (as he also later referred to it[4]) was provoked by what is described in Krapp's Last Tape (1958) as the 'vision at last', when Krapp grasps that the 'dark' he has 'always struggled to keep under' is in fact his true material.[5] Whereas Krapp's vision takes place on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, south of Dublin, Beckett later revealed that the event on which it was based occurred in his mother's room at New Place, in Foxrock, probably in the summer of 1945.[6]
If that vision in his mother's room gave Beckett a clearer sense of what he should be writing, it also, and no less importantly, had a major impact on how he would write. As he put it in conversation with Charles Juliet in October 1968: 'When I wrote the first sentence in Molloy, I had no idea where I was heading. And when I finished the first part, I didn't know how I was going to go on. It all just came out like that. Without any changes. I hadn't planned it, or thought it out at all.'[7] To John Pilling, Beckett described the writing of Molloy as 'like taking a walk'.[8] The manuscript of the original French text appears to support these claims; it has few significant revisions or marginal doodles, and gives the impression of having been written at considerable speed – in striking contrast to the manuscript of Watt, the novel Beckett wrote in English in the years immediately preceding the vision.[9]
The early French reception of Molloy tended to place it within the then-dominant mode of existentialism, perhaps unsurprisingly. According to Maurice Nadeau, for instance, Beckett 'settles us in the world of the Nothing where some nothings which are men move about for nothing. The absurdity of the world and the meaninglessness of our condition are conveyed in an absurd and deliberately insignificant fashion: never did anybody dare so openly to insult everything which man holds as certain, up to and including this language which he could at least lean upon to scream his doubt and despair.'[10] For Bernard Pingaud, Beckett reveals himself in Molloy as 'obsessed by the idea of death and nothingness', and Pingaud goes on to situate the novel in its post-war context, arguing that 'We live in a time of despair, where wrecks are everywhere, and Molloy is a wreck, hardly a man, an absence of a man. He is what would appear in man if all his human, logical, rational, polished and civic attributes were erased at a stroke.'[11] Whereas, in France, this broadly existentialist reading did not necessarily entail criticism, such was not the case across the Channel. Reviewing the English translation for The Observer in December 1955, Philip Toynbee concluded that there was no falsity in the novel – except, that is, for the 'gigantic falsity of its whole conception and existence'. For Toynbee, Beckett simply represented the 'end-product' in a long tradition of 'nihilistic writing', emanating from France.[12]
If the early reception of Molloy tended to place it in a philosophical context, subsequent readings often emphasised the novel's engagement with psychoanalysis. As early as March 1954, Thomas Hogan (in Irish Writing, no. 26) identified Molloy as a representation of the id, and the narrator of Part II, Jacques Moran, as a representation of the ego. As his 1930s reading notes reveal, when he was in analysis with Wilfred Bion in London, Beckett acquainted himself with a wide range of psychoanalytic writing, including the work of Freud, Jung, Alfred Adler and Otto Rank, of which explicit traces can be found in Molloy, with its references to the 'fatal pleasure principle' and to 'the Obidil' (an anagram of 'libido').
Breaking with the existentialist reading, in the late 1980s and 1990s attention was redirected towards the novel's narrative of self-undoing and its rhetoric of paradox and aporia. This concentration on the novel's language included increased reflection upon its status within Beckett's bilingual ?uvre. In this respect, Molloy stands out from the majority of his other works, since it is one of very few French texts the English translation of which he entrusted (in large part) to another. Although completing the original French version of Molloy by the beginning of November 1947, it was not until October 1950 that Beckett finally secured a publisher for the novel, and that principally through the efforts of his partner (later to be his wife), Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Six months before the appearance of the French edition in March 1951, however, part of the text had already been published in Beckett's own English translation in Georges Duthuit's Transition Fifty, no. 6.
That the complete English version of Molloy came to be published by the Olympia Press is owing to chance. In 1951 Richard Seaver happened to read, and was impressed by, both Molloy and Malone meurt. Seaver published his introductory essay on Beckett in the Autumn 1952 issue of Merlin, the literary magazine run by Alexander Trocchi and a group of other expatriates, including Seaver, Patrick Bowles, Christopher Logue and Austryn Wainhouse (whom Beckett would later refer to collectively as the 'Merlin juveniles').[13] On learning that Beckett had completed an unpublished novel in English (Watt), Seaver requested an extract for Merlin. The extract (chosen by Beckett) duly appeared in the Winter 1952–3 issue. Hoping to extend their activities to book publication, the Merlin editors next came to an arrangement with Maurice Girodias, who was setting up the English-language Olympia Press in Paris. Watt was published by the Olympia Press in its 'Collection Merlin' in August 1953, and, despite his annoyance at the numerous typographical errors, Beckett gave permission for publication in the same collection of an English translation of Molloy, which appeared in March 1955.
The title page of the Olympia Press edition of Molloy states that the work is 'a novel translated from the French by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the Author'. According to Bowles, when in July 1953 Beckett chose him as the translator of Molloy, he did so because he wanted 'a writer rather than a translator'.[14] That said, Beckett came to be intimately involved in the translation. As Bowles recollects: 'Every day we revised a few pages, pen in hand, but debating virtually every word. Occasionally Beckett would throw the cat among the chickens by saying, "Give it a bit of rhythm." That could mean re-casting an entire paragraph.'[15] It soon became clear to Bowles that the translation of Molloy was not a translation 'as that term is usually understood. It was not a mere matter of swapping counters, of substituting one word for another. It was as far apart from machine translation as one could imagine. Time and again Beckett said that what we were trying to do was to write the book again in another language – that is to say, write a new book.'[16] As a result, the translation took fifteen months (nine months longer than it had taken Beckett to write the novel), reaching completion in December 1954. When Bowles asked Beckett why he had not simply translated the work himself, Beckett replied that 'not having spoken or worked in English for seventeen years he felt out of touch with the language and wanted to work with an English writer for a while so as to feel his way back into the language'.[17] While the aim may well have been to write 'a new book in the second language',[18] Beckett remained adamant that his own role was limited to revising Bowles's translation.[19] However, Beckett's comments on the translation process in letters to Pamela Mitchell reveal his strong distaste for such a revising role, and he would translate his subsequent French works on his own.
As mentioned above, in October 1950, six months before the publication of Molloy in French, Beckett's own translation of a short passage from Part I was included in Transition Fifty, no. 6, as the first of 'Two Fragments', the second being the opening of Malone Dies (see Appendix, pp. 187–9).[20] The substantive differences between the text of this 'Fragment' and the corresponding passage in the Olympia Press edition offer insights into Beckett's own translation practice, anticipating, as they do, his role in the revision of Bowles's translation of the novel in 1953–4. Thus, There is rapture, or there should be, in the motion that crutches give, in the succession of little flights, in the taking off and landing among the thronging sound in wind and limb who have to fasten one foot to the ground before they dare lift the other (translating 'La démarche du béquillard, cela a, cela devrait avoir, quelque chose d'exaltant. Car c'est une série de petits vols, à fleur de terre. On décolle, on atterrit, parmi la foule des ingambes, qui n'osent soulever un pied de terre avant d'y avoir cloué l'autre') becomes: There is rapture, or there should be, in themotion crutches give. It is a series of little flights, skimming the ground. You take off, you land, through the thronging sound in wind and limb, who have to fasten one foot to the ground before they dare lift up the other. Following this passage, the Olympia Press edition adds the sentence: 'And even their most joyous hastening is less aerial than my hobble' (translating 'Et il n'est jusqu'à leur course la plus joyeuse qui ne sois moins aérienne que mon clopinement'). Again, And while I said to myself that time wasrunning out and that it would be soon too late, if it were not so already, to arrive at the settlement in question, yet at the same time I felt myself carried away towards other cares, other spectres (translating 'Et tout en me disant que le temps pressait et qu'il serait bient?t trop tard, qu'il l'était peut-être déjà, pour procéder au règlement en question, je me sentais qui dérivais vers d'autres soucis, d'autres spectres') becomes: And while saying to myself that time was running out, and that soon it would be too late, was perhaps too late already, to settle the matter in question, I felt myself drifting towards other cares, other phantoms. Or again, For if my region had come to an end at a reasonable remove, surely a sort of gradation would have marked the fact (translating 'Car si ma région avait fini à portée de mes pas, il me semble qu'une sorte de dégradement me l'aurait fait pressentir') becomes: For if my region had ended no further than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it changing slowly.
The reworkings show Beckett striving both for greater clarity and for greater simplicity of expression. Other revisions include the removal of words altogether or the substitution of a simpler, often more concrete, word or phrase. For instance, 'the question of my mother' ('le souci de ma mère') becomes 'my mother'; 'in her vicinity' ('dans son voisinage') becomes 'near her'; 'is it legitimate to speak here' ('est-ce le cas ici de parler') becomes 'can one speak here'; 'going forward' ('allant') becomes 'on'; 'I should necessarily' ('je finirais … forcément') becomes 'I was bound to'; 'So I applied myself to this, to the best of my ability' ('C'est done à cela que je m'appliquai, de toute ma science') becomes 'So I set myself to this as best I could'; 'I was obliged to admit that' ('je dus reconna?tre que') becomes 'I had to confess'; 'the sun, while its actual disk remained hidden' ('le soleil, sans être exactement visible comme disque') becomes 'the sun, already down'; and 'if I may trust the memory of my observations' ('si je peux me fier au souvenir de mes observations') becomes 'if I remember rightly'. Lastly, there are instances where the substitution of one word for another entails a subtle shift in meaning. Of these, among the most significant is the systematic replacing of 'belief' (translating 'croyance') by 'feeling'.
In the four years separating French (1951) and English publication (1955), three further passages appeared in English, all from Part I, in Merlin, Paris Review and New World Writing. Like the 'Fragment' published in Transition Fifty, these remain important in their own right, since they constitute earlier stages in the translation undertaken by Bowles and revised by Beckett. The first of the three passages, from the opening of the novel, appeared in Merlin in September 1953 as an 'Extract from Molloy' (see Appendix, pp. 191–212), and is identified as having been 'translated from the french by p. w. bowles'. A comparison of the Merlin and Olympia Press texts reveals not only Beckett's close attention to the smallest details of translation, including punctuation, but also some of the key principles governing his approach to his own self-translations: a deliberate impoverishment, an attempt to achieve the greatest possible simplicity, and even a certain stylelessness. Evidence for this is to be found in the recurrent preference for less sophisticated words or phrases. For instance, 'a queer card' in Merlin ('un dr?le de type') becomes 'a queer one' in the Olympia text; 'folly' ('bête') becomes 'madness'; 'were acquainted' ('se connaissaient') becomes 'knew each other'; 'unmethodical, distracted' ('sans méthode et affolée') becomes 'wildly'; 'disinflame his brain' ('se décongestionner le cerveau') becomes 'cool his brain'; 'leave this place' ('aller ailleurs') becomes 'go'; and 'don't pay any heed to it' ('n'y faites pas attention') becomes 'don't mind it'. There are a few occasions, on the other hand, when Beckett opts for a more expansive translation: 'climbed' ('montait') becomes 'loomed'; 'hold their sabbath' ('tiennent leur sabbat') becomes 'dance their sabbath'; 'what language' ('quelle langue') becomes 'what rigmarole'; and 'bet' ('à bout d'expédients') becomes 'bet to the world'. Beckett also irons out clumsy or too-literal phrasing. Thus, 'describing long girations' ('faisait de longues girations') becomes 'turning in slow circles'; 'caused to come and go in an arc' ('lui fis décrire des arcs') becomes 'moved in an arc, to and fro'; and 'a protector in high places' ('un protecteur en haut lieu') becomes 'a friend at court'. On one occasion, he also increases the obscenity, 'an old fool' ('un vieux con') becoming 'an old ballocks'. And among the most suggestive changes is the inclusion in the Olympia Press edition of a sentence found neither in the original French nor in Merlin, describing the boatman (le nocher in the original French) – 'He had a long white beard' – anticipating the Boy's confirmation of Godot's beard in Act II: 'I think it's white, Sir.'
The second, similarly titled 'Extract from Molloy' was published in George Plimpton's Paris Review in March 1954 (see Appendix, pp. 213–24). It recounts Molloy's sojourn by the sea, including the sucking-stones episode, and is identified as having been 'Translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author'. The variants when compared with the book version reveal changes of both individual words and entire phrases. Again, these include simplifications and reductions; for instance, 'for all my anxiety to be dispelled' ('pour être tout à fait tranquille') becomes 'in order to be quite easy in my mind'; and 'schooled myself to endure' ('encaissé l'altération') becomes 'got used to'. The changes moreover introduce words and habits of phrasing that would recur in Beckett's later works. For instance, 'brooding on endless martingales' ('en ruminant des martingales') becomes 'revolving interminable martingales' – 'revolving' being a key word in the 1976 play Footfalls; 'road' ('chemin') becomes 'way', while 'highways' ('routes') becomes 'roads'; 'who cares' ('?a ne fait rien') becomes 'no matter'; and 'I think' ('je crois') becomes 'I fancy'. Some changes also heighten the symmetry of the phrasing, or impart a more pronounced rhythm. These include 'without limit to its stations or hope of crucifixion' ('sans limite de station ni espoir de crucifixion') becoming 'with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion'. Another notable revision is the introduction of possessive pronouns which reflect the original French: 'reducing the number of stones' ('réduire celui [le nombre] de mes pierres') becomes 'reducing the number of my stones'; 'being off balance' ('me sentir en déséquilibre') becomes 'being off my balance'. On the other hand, Beckett's revisions of the Paris Review text include instances of what he appears to consider to be a too literal rendering: 'relatively' ('relativement') becomes 'comparatively'; 'on the sensory level at least' ('sur le plan de la sensation tout au moins') becomes 'at least as far as the pain was concerned'.
In April 1954, a third passage was published under the title 'Molloy' in New World Writing, vol. 5. Like the 'extract' printed in Merlin, this text is a translation of the opening of the novel and, aside from the fact that it is shorter, is almost identical to that in Merlin. The most notable difference between the two texts is that, whereas the Merlin text renders the two persons seen by Molloy as 'A' and 'C' (translating the 'A' and 'B' of the French original), as in the Olympia Press edition, the New World Writing text is inconsistent, rendering them as both 'A' and 'B' and 'A' and 'C'.
In August 1955, six months after its Olympia Press publication, the English Molloy was published in the United States by Grove Press. In January 1956, the novel was banned in Ireland on the grounds of obscenity, and later in the same year was also banned in Canada. The first British edition appeared in the 1959 volume Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (published by John Calder), and only in 1966 as a discrete volume. Since its first publication in 1951, the original French version of Molloy has been kept in print as an independent volume, Les éditions de Minuit having thus far resisted calls for its integration with Malone meurt and L'Innommable. This is in striking contrast to the novel's publication history in English, since both in the United States and in Britain Molloy has generally – since 1959 – been published together with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, often with the subtitle Three Novels. In the 'Notes on Contributors' section on Beckett in the Spring 1954 issue of the Paris Review, he is identified as the author of a 'trilogy of novels', and later Calder editions of the three works in one volume labelled them The Beckett Trilogy, as did the 1979 Picador edition. While Beckett did make clear to Aidan Higgins that he wished to see the novels published together, he was none the less resistant to their being identified as a 'trilogy'.
It is unfortunate that the 'disintegration' both thematised and enacted stylistically in Molloy has also been reflected in its textual history. The 1955 Olympia Press edition is marred by typographical errors and orthographical inconsistencies. While the first Calder edition (1959) corrects some (but not all) of these errors, it also introduces new ones, including the omission of words. The first discrete Calder edition (1966) contains further typographical errors, for example rendering Youdi's address as 'Arcadia' (rather than 'Acacia') Square. The American Grove Press edition contains far fewer errors than any of the Calder editions, but some of the obvious errors in the original Olympia Press edition remain uncorrected therein, including inconsistency in the rendering of the name of the Elsner sisters' cook (in the original French text, her name is 'Hanna'; in the English translation this is rendered first as 'Hannah' and then, at the very end of the novel, as 'Hanna').
Given this history of deterioration, the present edition returns for its copy-text to the first English-language edition (Olympia Press, 1955), correcting all obvious typographical errors. For the most part, these errors and inconsistencies take the form of orthographical mistakes ('antechrist' for 'Antichrist', no doubt owing to the fact that the French spelling is antéchrist; 'herbacious' for 'herbaceous'; 'langour' for 'languor'), a mixture of English and American spellings, and of '-ise' and '-ize' endings, some irregular hyphenation ('good-bye'/'goodbye'; 'good-will'/'goodwill'; 'handle-bars'/'handlebars'), transposed letters and words, omitted marks of punctuation, and, on a few occasions, omitted words. The text of the Olympia Press edition is also characterised by a number of peculiarities that cannot be described as errors, the most notable being the frequent use of hyphenation for compound nouns (for example, 'police-sergeant'; 'sucking-stones'; 'supply-pocket'; 'lemon-verbena'; and 'garden-gate'). A number of other terms that one might have expected to find as single words are hyphenated in the Olympia Press edition; these include 'arm-chair', 'ash-tray', time-table' and 'cork-screw'. All such orthographical peculiarities have been retained in the present edition. A number of the corrections made in the 1959 Calder edition have not been adopted in the present edition, either because these corrections are misguided or because, while arguably justifiable, they interfere with phrasing that is distinctly Beckettian. An example of the former is the 'correction' of 'object of virtu' (translating 'objet de vertu') in the Olympia Press edition to 'object of virtue'; an example of the latter is the changing of the phrase 'And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir' (translating 'Et il para?t qu'ici rien ne bouge, ni n'a jamais bougé, ni ne bougera jamais') to 'And it says that here nothing stirs, has ever stirred, will ever stir'. Lastly, there are two occasions where the phrasing is strange enough to have led to its being altered in later editions; these are 'bet to the world' (changed to 'beat to the world' in the Calder and Picador editions) and 'let a roar' (changed to 'let out a roar'). In the present edition, the original phrasing has been retained on the grounds that it is characteristic of Beckett's Irish English.
Shane Weller
Canterbury, 2009
Notes
[1] The play Eleutheria, written in January–February 1947, before Godot, remained unpublished until 1995.
[2] Richard Seaver, 'Samuel Beckett: An Introduction', Merlin, vol. 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1952), p. 73. The two novels to which Seaver is referring here are Molloy and Malone meurt.
[3] Beckett to Lawrence E. Harvey; quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 358.
[4] Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 346.
[5] Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 220.
[6] See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 352. John Pilling observes that while 1945 is the 'most likely date' for this 'vision', it may have occurred in 1946 or 'just possibly' in 1947 (John Pilling, A Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 94).
[7] Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Janey Tucker (Leiden: Academic Press, 1995), p. 140.
[8] Beckett quoted in John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 11.
[9] That, in one respect, Beckett was not being modest when he claimed to have 'no idea' where he was heading when he began Molloy is confirmed by an addition to the second paragraph of the English translation of the novel. In the published French text, this paragraph begins: 'Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense, puis c'en sera fini je pense, de ce monde-là aussi. C'est le sens de l'avant-dernier.' In the published English translation, these sentences are rendered as: 'This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it'll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one' (emphasis added). This addition in translation takes account not only of the 'once more' of Malone meurt (written between November 1947 and May 1948) but also of the novel he wrote between March 1949 and January 1950, L'Ilnnommable – these three novels forming a sequence, though not necessarily (for Beckett) a 'trilogy'.
[10] Nadeau in Combat, 12 April 1951; reprinted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 53 (trans. Francoise Longhurst).
[11] Pingaud in Esprit, September 1951; reprinted in Graver and Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett, pp. 67–8 (trans. Fran?oise Longhurst).
[12] Reprinted in Graver and Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett, pp. 74–5.
[13] See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, pp. 393–7.
[14] Patrick Bowles, 'How to Fail: Notes on Talks with Samuel Beckett', PN Review 96, vol. 20, no. 4 (March–April 1994), p. 24.
[15] Bowles, 'How to Fail', p. 24.
[16] Bowles, 'How to Fail', p. 27.
[17] Bowles, 'How to Fail', p. 27.
[18] Bowles, 'How to Fail', p. 33.
[19] See Pilling, A Beckett Chronology, p. 128.
[20] I wish to express my thanks to Mark Nixon for very kindly having supplied me with copies of the 'Fragment' of Molloy published in Transition Fifty, no. 6, and the passage published under the title 'Molloy' in New World Writing, vol. 5.
