A hand-written manuscript of Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett's first published novel, Murphy, featuring his notes and doodles, has fetched nearly 1 million pounds at an auction here.
The University of Reading in UK paid 962,500 pounds for the manuscript at the auction at Sotheby's, yesterday.
At nearly 800 pages long, Murphy is among the greatest literary manuscripts of the 20th century and, according to Sotheby's, is the "most important manuscript of a complete novel by a modern British or Irish writer to appear at auction for many decades".
The manuscript, which includes sketches of Beckett's contemporaries such as James Joyce, fills six notebooks, and provides a text that is substantially different from the final printed edition in 1938.
With its revisions, different colour inks, dated pages and doodles, it is an extraordinarily rich manifestation of Beckett's writing practices.
"The notebooks contain almost infinite riches. The manuscript is capable of redefining Beckett studies for many years to come," said Peter Selley, Sotheby's Senior Specialist in Books and Manuscripts.
Murphy concerns the main character's attempts to find peace in the nothingness of the 'little world' of the mind without intrusion from the outside world.
It is Beckett's London novel, which he began writing in August 1935 while undergoing intensive psychoanalysis there. It was completed in Dublin in 1936 and unlike many of his other works, which were written in French, was written in English.
There are significant textual differences from the published novel throughout the manuscript.
The most heavily revised passages provide fascinating evidence about the portions of the text that gave Beckett most trouble.
Eight versions of the opening are crossed out until the Nobel prize-winning author eventually settled on "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
"This major acquisition for the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading will open up access to this unique manuscript to Beckett scholars and the interested public the world over," said Dr Mark Nixon, Director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.
