By one of those odd accidents of literary history the work of Samuel Beckett has been revealed to most of us backward: first his play, "Waiting for Godot," written in the Fifties, next "Malloy" and "Malone Dies," novels published just after the last war; and now "Murphy," which first appeared in 1938 but was scarcely noticed in this country. In the meanwhile Mr. Beckett has undergone a transformation from an English writer to a French one. "Murphy" was published first in the language of its Irish author. The later novels and the play have come to us as his own translations from the language of the country of his exile, France. 

    The metamorphosis is appropriate: Beckett is one of the last of the post-World War I expatriates, an almost final survivor of that experimentalism in literature and that vision of Paris as a cultural homeland, over which his master, James Joyce, once presided. Come on in the Fifties, discovered backward from the highbrow burlesque of "Godot," such a survivor has a special appeal, seems quite different from what he might have appeared against the background of the decaying tag-ends of the avant-garde of the Twenties. 

    Yet it is in terms of the aspirations of the Twenties that this writer must be understood; for, at the very moment when the once-touted "revolution of the word" and "stream of consciousness" itself seem conventions irrevocably past, facts of history, he has found a way of vitalizing them. In the sense that nothing is more old-fashioned than yesterday's experimentalism, Samuel Beckett is the most old-fashioned of writers. Yet he is in effect a fresh and moving one, for he has redeemed the conventions he preserves. 

    The sources of his vitality are the same in "Murphy" as in his later fiction, though the earlier book is not quite so successful. Too much of the merely mannered is present, too much evidence of a desire to twit the bourgeoisie, too many asides, too many heavy-handed cryptic remarks, too much clumsy surrealist horseplay. But the eerie deadpan humor is already at work: the gravely mathematical working out of all the possibilities of the most trivial situation, the savage eagerness to find in the disgusting occasions for laughs. It is as vaudevillian of the avant-garde that Beckett especially tickles us, converting its most solemn devices into quite serious gags. 

    He does more than this. As early as "Murphy," he has discovered his function as the laureate of dissociation, the celebrator of the schizoid. The logic of the method of "stream of consciousness" leads finally into illogical depths where outer reality is lost in the shifting of fantasy and dislocated memory, where the "real" no longer matters. It is this lost world that Beckett has been trying to find; and because he has been seeking it, he makes the schizophrenic his model and hero. 

    Murphy, who searches in an insane asylum for the peace life denies him, is such a hero; he is the final rebel who rejects not only work and respectability, marriage and money, but any attempt to order the world of experience. In this author's books such figures become almost saintly, fools of God. And their ends, however brutal (Murphy is burned to death by an exploding gas heater), are felt as beautiful beside the fate of those who merely go on living. 

   To render his extreme comic vision of an unbearable world, Mr. Beckett has been slowly evolving a denuded style like no one else's, a low-keyed, unexpected poetry only fitfully present in "Murphy." Funniest, perhaps, of his novels, but least poetic, "Murphy" evokes a ferocity of terror and humor that shames most well-made novels of our time.