Samuel Beckett

The hearsay, as one would expect, reveals little of value. The public records reveal that Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 (appropriately enough for this God-haunted man a Good Friday), the second son of a quantity surveyor who married a nurse. 'You might say I had a happy childhood,' Beckett has said, 'although I had little talent for happiness.' It was, however, perfectly normal on the surface: he went running, played cricket and rugby with his brother Frank, and went fishing with his father. His parents were Protestants in Catholic Ireland and he was brought up 'almost a Quaker'. He is still proud today of the fact that the Becketts spring from Huguenot stock.

At Ida Elsner's Academy, a kindergarten he attended at Stillorgan, and later at Earlsfort House prep school in Dublin, where he first learned French, Beckett began to reveal the scholastic ability that later led to a university teaching post. Hand-in-hand with this went a developing sensitivity to suffering. He gave up eating lobsters when he discovered they were boiled alive (a theme dramatized in 'Dante and the Lobster'), drew pictures of tramps, and suffered from a fear of heights that seems to have been brought on by his father giving him diving lessons. The sight of Dublin blazing in Easter Week 1916, as he and his father looked on from the hills above the city, has remained deeply impressed on his mind. The deaths from tuberculosis of members of his family was a cause of great sadness in the early years; the death of a girl cousin he was particularly close to was perhaps the most crucial of all.

At the age of 14, during the Easter term, he joined his brother as a boarder at Portora Royal School, a well-known public school at Enniskillen, near the Republic. Here he showed considerable ability at French, Latin, Classics and English, swam distance races and sprints, boxed, and continued to play his favourite games -rugby and cricket. His juvenilia seem, mercifully, to have disappeared; while they would no doubt offer a fascinating insight into what he had been reading, they could only have been derivative and lightweight.

Another enormous advantage for men of original genius in Ireland is the existence of Trinity College, one of the great places of learning since its foundation in 1591. It was here, in 1923, three years after going to Portora, that Beckett began to read for a degree in Modern Languages (French and Italian). His tutor was A. A. Luce, the editor of Berkeley; his professor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown, was a poet, and editor of Marivaux, Racine and Corneille. Beckett very largely inherited the enthusiasms of these two men; his first play, little more than a skit, was subtitled 'a Cornellian nightmare', and when he lectured on Andromaque years later as a don, he analysed the play as characters chasing each other in a circle - which may tell us more about the future author of Murphy than about Racine. After a good, and then an indifferent year, he got the best First of his year and was elected in 1926 to a Foundation Scholarship. In his leisure moments, he went to the Abbey Theatre, where both the acting and the plays were as good as anything to be seen at the time.