Six notebooks, containing the handwritten draft of Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on July 10th, and has an estimated price of £800,000 – £1.2 million.

Initially entitled Sasha Murphy, the heavily revised draft was penned by Beckett between August 1935 and June 1936 when he was undergoing an intense period of psychoanalysis.

The manuscript – originally titled Sasha Murphy – is filled with doodles and extensive corrections, including sketches of his friend and mentor James Joyce, himself, and Charlie Chaplin,  as well as astrological symbols and musical notations.

The first 11 pages are entirely crossed out.  The novel’s famous opening sentence did not come easily for Beckett.  He tried “The sun shone, as only the sun can, on nothing new”, working through various alternatives before ending up with: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

At over 800 pages long, the draft provides a substantially different text from the printed version of the published 1938 novel. which concerns Murphy and his farcical attempts to find peace without intrusion from the outside world, most notably by working in an insane asylum.  Despite its dark philosophical underpinnings, it is a comic masterpiece, and marks Beckett’s last major effort at writing in English, prior to switching to French.

“The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.”