80. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

Beckett was gripped by a love of the letter M. Several of his works begin with it (Murphy, Molloy, Mercier and Camier, Malone Dies) as do many of his characters (Moran, Mahood, Madeleine, Moll, Macmann, etc). In the novella Company the narrator calls his hearer ‘M’; ‘MMM’ is the ‘Magdalen Mental Mercyseat’ in Murphy; in How It Is the characters have been reduced to Pim, Bom, Bem and Pam, ‘one syllable m at end all that matters’ (as Beckett put it). In early drafts of Malone Dies the protagonist was simply called ‘M’, and it is easily seen that ‘Malone’, broken apart, reads ‘M Alone’.

Why all these Ms? Shall we wax psychoanalytical? There was only one significant ‘M’ in Beckett’s life: his mother, May, with whom he had a fraught, guilt-ridden relationship. As John Banville put it recently: ‘Beckett's mother, May, was a loving though stern woman, brooding and given to unpredictable fits of anger followed by lengthy bouts of depression [...] Like so many Irishmen, Beckett was deeply attached to his mother – "I am what her savage loving has made me" – in a classic love-hate relationship that was to endure long after her death; his later decision to settle permanently in France, and to write in French, seemed as much a flight from the mother as from the motherland.'

Beckett called ‘M’ the ‘fundamental sound’. Perhaps it was the sound, recapitulated in self-torture, of ‘Mama’.

Consulted:
Ackerley, Chris, Gontarski, S. E.: The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004)
Banville, John: review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The New Republic, May 20, 2009, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=30f007e1-9a95-4dea-98dc-af9ad009aaaf

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