Written in 1946, "Mercier and Camier" was Samuel Beckett's first postwar novel and his first in French. The manuscript was accepted in 1947 by Beckett's first French publisher, Bordas, but for reasons unknown he withdrew it before publication. For 24 hears he steadfastly refused to allow it to be published, calling it a working draft or preliminary attempt to evolve a new technique in fiction. Most Beckett scholars included some discussion of it in their critical studies, often quoting large passages from photocopies of the original typescript given to them by Beckett himself. As some of these typescripts found their way into university collections, copies of the copies were widely circulated to an underground scholarly élite, until finally his publishers persuaded him that it seemed foolish to withhold publication any longer. 

    The French edition appeared in 1970. Beckett delayed the chore of self-translation as long as he could, but finally finished what was for him a disagreeable task in 1974. With the current Grove Press edition, all but one of the known works of Beckett's most fertile creative period have been published ("Eleutheria," a 1947 French play, is still in typescript, and "Les Bosquets de Bondy," a first-draft manuscript of "Mercier and Camier" which will probably never be published) and it is now possible to read Beckett's writing chronologically and to trace the evolution of his fictional technique. 

    In 1935, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Beckett ended two depressing years in London where he had tried unsuccessfully to shape a literary career. He returned to his family's comfortable home in the upper-class Dublin suburb of Foxrock. There, he resisted all his mother's efforts to persuade him to forget writing and go to work, either in the family quantity-surveying business (run by his brother since his father's sudden death in 1933) or in some other respectable profession. He had a ready excuse for refusing each offer that came his way. 

    He wrote little during the next two years, and for most of this time was solitary and depressed. He survived by surreptitiously borrowing an occasional pound from a friend and selling his books in second-hand shops. He lived mainly on the generosity of his brother and small sums handed out by his mother, who doled out little more than cigarette money, and that only when she sensed his frustration verged on rage. 

    By October, 1937, after two years of vacillation, trying first to come to terms with life in Ireland and then to escape from it, Beckett made the final break and went to Paris. Angered by his decision, which had been two years in the making, his mother went off into secret seclusion and forbade his brother to tell Beckett where she had gone. He was forced to make his final departure from Ireland engulfed in guilt for the pain he had inflicted on his family. But he went knowing that he could do no productive work if he stayed. 

    "Mercier and Camier" captures this time of depression and indecision in Beckett's life. It continues the line of vagabond heroes which begins with Belacqua in "More Pricks Than Kicks" and continues with "Murphy" and "Watt." They are the first of his vaudevillian couples, and this novel is in many ways the precursor of "Waiting for Godot." If there is a chronological line of development in his writing, "Mercier and Camier" surely marks the first tentative approach toward what Beckett calls the "mature" fiction of "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable." In the trilogy, Beckett relentlessly reduces his characters from pitiful creatures with few possessions--a hat, a pot, a stub of pencil--to voices, who have only the inner torments of their past life to sustain their present existence, doomed to repeat themselves until finally, even the voice, their last vestige of humanity, is stilled. There is no discernible setting, no tie with any real existence, and seemingly, no plot. 

    In "Mercier and Camier," the journey shapes the plot as the two men parade on an endless quest. Despite its somberness, it is in some ways a warm and funny book, occasionally tinged with stinging sarcasm. There are secondary characters, skillfully and swiftly delineated, so bizarre that even the two oddities of the title are struck by their madness. Mercier and Camier are otherworldly figures themselves, but they need the trappings of the real world in order to give their story coherence, and this is no doubt part of the reason why Beckett chose to abandon them and go on to the Malones and Malloys of his later fiction. 

    Just about this time, Beckett discovered that writing was for him the most intensely personal experience possible, depending not on verbal virtuosity or on the careful construction of the traditional novel. For him, creation satisfied only when he could plumb the depths of his unconscious, find an incident from his own life, and then work to conceal biography within the framework of his creative consciousness, changing dimensions of time and space according to the whim of his fictional voices. He reduces life to a series of tales, told first by one, then another (perhaps the same) voice, but all the voices are his. 

    Beckett perfected this method of writing novels when he discovered what he has called the most important revelation of his literary career--the first person monologue. He found he could create a multi-dimensional universe through the use of a voice telling a story. At the same time, this relentless voice could reveal character in its most desperate loneliness, stripping it as never before in contemporary fiction. 

    Written just before "Molloy," "Mercier and Camier" stands on the threshold of Beckett's mature fiction. There are large chunks of dialogue which he later transferred directly into Godot, but here speech is encumbered by a plot with progression and movement, albeit circuitous and often contradictory. There is a narrator, as in "Murphy" and "Watt," who occasionally intrudes to inject an acerbic comment and who thinks nothing of slowing down, speeding up, or otherwise circumventing the progress of the "pseudo-couple" (as they are called in "The Unnamable"). 

    "Mercier and Camier" is about voluntary exile, much like Beckett's own. While it can be read as the odyssey of Beckett and the other young Irishmen who went to Paris in the 1930's hoping to gain the same success as their countryman of an older generation, James Joyce, it can also be read as two aspects of the personality of Beckett himself. Before his departure, he had been easily recognizable in Dublin by his shapeless, dirty raincoat, several sizes too large. He was plagued by recurring idiosyncratic cysts. When he wrecked his own car, he had continuous problems with his bicycle. In a drunken moment, he lost his favorite hat, which he mourned long afterwards. 

    It is the raincoat, however, which best symbolizes the final division of his first 30 years from the rest of his life, as well as this novel's place in his canon: when he left Dublin, Beckett threw his raincoat away, just as Mercier and Camier, after throwing theirs away, walk off into their own uncertain future, looking back now and again at the heap on the ground--unwilling to go on with it, but hesitant to abandon it.