Search for ‘Christopher Tayler’ (5 articles found)
The original of Murphy
Legal sanctions were in place against the talking cure in Ireland when Samuel Beckett decided to give it a shot. He’d been having panic attacks since his father’s death in 1933. So in 1934, aged 27, he moved to London, a place he didn’t much like but that at least wasn’t Dublin (where, he wrote in a letter, ‘you ask for a fish & they give you a piece of bog oak’). In addition to not believing that the Irish public ‘ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever’, he was on the run from his mother, who was, as he put it, ‘alertly bereaved’ and also prone to unlettered bourgeois notions concerning salaried employment. When not discussing her with his analyst, Wilfred Bion, a future pioneer of group therapy, Beckett read widely, moped in galleries and parks, visited a doctor friend working at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and generally gathered the material that went into Murphy, his first published novel.
Written between August 1935 and June 1936, Murphy was eventually accepted by Routledge after an extended bout of rejections and published in March 1938. Sales weren’t stellar – 568 copies in the first year, dropping to seven in 1941 – and reviewers were a bit baffled. In the New English Weekly Dylan Thomas called it ‘difficult, serious, and wrong’. Kate O’Brien was kinder in the Spectator and Brian Coffey, an Irish poet Beckett knew, wrote a thoughtful appreciation which didn’t make it into print. In the mid-1930s Beckett could be pissy about ‘Coffee’, as he was about nearly everyone then, but he warmed to him later and at some point down the line made him a gift of the manuscript. Coffey sold it in the 1960s and it disappeared into a collector’s hoard, where it started to generate plaintive footnotes about scholarly non-access. Most of what was known about it came from James Knowlson, who wangled a brief inspection in a bank vault in London in 1976. Even after he’d landed the role of Beckett’s official biographer, though, Knowlson wasn’t allowed a closer look.
So it felt quite strange to show up at Sotheby’s the other day, with the sun beating hard on the nothing new, walk into an air-conditioned room in which Beckett enthusiasts were the only people not in suits, and be allowed to leaf through the holograph notebooks, headed ‘Sasha Murphy’, which were being sold ‘by order of the executors of the late Stanley Eker’. (Why ‘Sasha’? No one seems to know for sure, but perhaps it’s a private joke about Russian novels: Beckett wrote that he wasn’t sure he’d avoided the ‘Aliosha mistake’ in his handling of the title character.) There were, as Knowlson reported, six of them, and Gabriel Heaton, the Sotheby’s specialist in charge, was unfazed when I reverently asked if I could snap the 1930s road safety advice for children printed on the back of Notebook V. (‘Don’t forget to walk on the footpath – if there is one.’ A subliminal prompt for the famous bull – ‘Do not come down the ladder, they have taken it away’ – in chapter 9?)
Beckett doodled when he got stuck, and like the drafts of Watt, at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the Murphy notebooks are filled with, in the catalogue’s words, ‘faces and human figures, bowler-hatted figures, golfers, a mermaid, bicycles, syringes (?), musical notations, flowers and abstract shapes’, plus recognisable drawings of Charlie Chaplin in tramp guise, Beckett himself and James Joyce.
He also had, in the opinion of a manuscript specialist consulted by the editors of his letters, ‘the worst handwriting of any 20th-century author’, and I felt increasingly grateful to Heaton as he walked me through the hard-to-decipher highlights: nine pages of scratched-out stabs at the opening paragraph; deleted versions of Mr Endon’s unusual game of chess; extensive doodlings and crossings out in the notebook Beckett worked in during an unhappy visit home; dating seemingly showing that the closing kite-flying scene was written at a single sitting.
As we both understood, though, textual inquiry takes second place to feeling that you’re somehow in Beckett’s presence when you’re looking at his physical handiwork in an auction house. Who were they expecting to pay a million quid for it? The Harry Ransom Center? Yes, they were anticipating institutional bidders. ‘But the thing about Beckett,’ Heaton said, ‘is that there are lots of very enthusiastic people outside the academic world too.’ It wasn’t impossible, he reckoned, that some super-rich fan might try to snap it up. Through a complex chain of association involving The Fast Show, I started to picture Johnny Depp gloating over the notebooks on a yacht. But in the event Knowlson, representing the University of Reading, came through with the winning bid of £962,500.
A few more personal details
A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors. While I do not want to overdo this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English department, replied:
The information you suggest suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in. A few words about my schooling, for example, make me a player in the English-South African game of social typing and can even be read as a compliment to those monsters of sadism who ruled over my life for 11 years. As for my family background, I am one of the ten thousand Coetzees, and what is there to be said about them except that Jacobus Coetzee [a historical frontiersman reimagined in Dusklands] begat them all?
Among his interests, he added, were ‘crowd sports; other people’s ailments; apes and humanoid machines; images, particularly photographs, and their power over the human heart; and the politics of assent’. These warning shots, if that’s what they were, backfired: Randall put a list of the author’s interests on the novel’s back cover along with details of his family tree. Coetzee had them removed from subsequent editions, complaining that his letters had been misused, and for many years the original Dusklands jacket was the only instance of arch self-display in an otherwise spotless record of authorial impersonality.
Letters between J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster
Sometimes Auster endeavours to match Coetzee’s otherworldly tone, but it’s obvious that he’s too embedded in a world of opening nights and the New York Times: the best he can manage is a suggestion that Israel relocate to Wisconsin. Soon he begins to seem less than wholly confident of being a sufficiently heavyweight figure to go toe to toe with Coetzee in the realm of thought. He tries to interest his correspondent in baseball, in vain. Increasingly he tells rather self-admiring anecdotes, among them an account of a week in which he kept running into Charlton Heston – in Cannes, at a Chicago book fair and in Manhattan while on the way to lunch with Juliette Binoche. ‘What am I to make of this, John? Do things like this happen to you, or am I the only one?’ Answer: ‘It doesn’t seem strange to me that, operating in a film environment, you should keep running into another person from that environment. What is bizarre is that it should be Charlton Heston.’ He refers Coetzee to pieces in ‘my Collected Prose’ and sends him books and movies. Updates on Auster’s projects elicit polite responses: ‘So you have completed a 200-page history of your body. What an interesting idea … I’ll wait to see whether you deal with your body part by part or treat it integrally.’
Christopher Tayler on the BBC/HBO 'Parade's End'
What’s more, it was non-terrible in unusual ways for a high-end adaptation. Unlike last year’s movie of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and lots of British television dramas, it didn’t coast from scene to scene on set design while doling out plot points here and there; elliptical prettiness, when deployed, at least arose from the material. Stoppard’s script, as you’d expect, had its stage-comical moments, and it encouraged a lot of sitcom hamming around the surreal figure of Breakfast Duchemin (pronounced ‘Doucheman’ in this production). There were too many smug interpolations: a visit to one of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions, ladies coming and going talking of Michelangelo etc. But the script did a heroic job of sculpting followable storylines while making some of the nuances TV-comprehensible. In the largely confected Episode 2, it even threw in some time-shifts of its own. I’m not sure how well it worked as an upmarket costume drama, but as a weird amalgam of would-be modernistic gestures and posh Blackadder moments, it wasn’t the sort of thing you see every day.
On Nicholson Baker's 'House of Holes'
There’s a complicated network of motifs: in addition to body-part removal and replacement, recurring images include mountain zebras, women laying wooden or silver eggs and people drinking sherry cobblers (iced cocktails mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit, as a character explains). Here and there, we’re filled in on the HoH’s humanitarian aspects. They have ‘an airplane that flies around sucking up bad porn from cities’; the porn is piped into holding tanks where it unexpectedly gives rise to a sentient ‘tumorousness of overstimulated desire’. And sometimes there are glimpses of the outside world. Online porn – a non-issue when Baker was writing Vox – has a counterpart at the HoH’s Porndecahedron, a multi-screened experience that solo visitors find exhausting and dispiriting after a while. A man uses mystic powers to combat the fashion for pubic hair removal and tattooing – ‘a way of not being naked while being naked’, he says dismissively. A woman with ‘big patriotic tits’, who causes havoc by confiscating people’s clitorises, derives her authority from the 9/11 attacks, being an employee of the federal Transportation Security Administration.
