3.1 Samuel L.

Becketts life
Censorship strongly affected a large number of authors, which are considered today to
be canonical and whose works are highly appreciated by critics, as well as by readers. One of
these authors was Samuel L. Beckett, an Irish avant-garde poet, novelist and playwright,
wordly known for his play, Waiting for Godot.
- With his life, Mr. Beckett proved that it was actually possible, even in our own inferior century, for a
writer to work and to live with a great seriousness, a great caring, and a great integrity. [...] Not a saint
- at times not even totally tasteful - but ever an artist: clear-voiced, responsible, in line with the best.
[...] Around him, the quality of Life was odious, and the quality of Death an unsatisfying alternative 1.
"- Sam is the end of 20th-century modernism. He's the last inheritor of Joyce and Pound, and right
down to the end was working in that increasingly narrow corridor"2.
"- He's the quintessential modern artist, post-Joyce, and to my mind he took the despairing streak in
modernism to its ultimate conclusion. With how much Irish music, bucolic music, nothingness is
evoked! Beckett is one of the people who taught me to write. The fewer words express a reality there,
and reality surely flavored his view. We all live in a Beckett world, don't we? The butt end of a
civilization3.

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, on April 13 th,
1906, as the younger of two sons of William Frank Beckett and May Barclay (Graver 2004:
24).
Recounting about Becketts childhood, the Irish biographer Anthony Cronin said that
he was,
- if anything, an outdoor type rather than an indoor one. He enjoyed games and was good at them. He
roamed by himself as well as with his cousin and brother; and though he often retreated to his tower
with a book and was already noticeable in the family circle for a certain moodiness and taciturnity, he

1Israel Horovitz on Samuel Becketts death in The Boston Globe,

http://www.samuel-beckett.net/boston/friend.html, accessed on September the
15th
2 Robert Taylor in The Boston Globe, http://www.samuelbeckett.net/boston/sbremem.html, accessed on September the 15th
3 Ibidem54

could on the whole have passed for an athletic, extrovert little Protestant middle-class boy with
excellent manners when forced to be sociable4.

When it comes to Becketts education, he attended Trinity College from 1923 to 1927.
He earned a bachelors degree in French and Italian and began to develop a passion for
Romance poetry and laguages. After finishing college, he took a teaching position at
Campbell College in Belfast. Not long after, he moved to Paris in order to be lecteur
danglais at the cole Normale Suprieure5.
There, Beckett met the Irish novelist James Joyce, an author who profoundly
influenced him as a person, as well as a writer. James Knowlson, one of Becketts biographers
wrote about their relation:
- They both had degrees in French and Italian [...]. Joyce's exceptional linguistic abilities and the
wide range of his reading in Italian, German, French, and English impressed the linguist and scholar in
Beckett [...]. They both adored words -- their sounds, rhythms, shapes, etymologies, and histories -- and
Joyce had a formidable vocabulary derived from many languages and a keen interest in the
contemporary slang of several languages that Samuel Beckett admired and tried to emulate6.

Beckett accepted a position at Trinity College, which he attented, thus returning to

Dublin, but he did not spend too much time as a lecturer there and resigned, as a consequance
of his profound disillusion with academia7.
There were two major events that affected Beckett as a writer: his resignation from
Trinity College and his fatherss death. Therefore, after he resigned from his lecturer position,
he started travelling across Britain and Europe. During his time as a traveller, he had the
opportunity to meet all kind of people, even wanderers and vagabonds; people whom he
turned into rememberable characters8.

4 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/, accessed of September

the 15th
5 Ibidem17
6 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/, accessed on September
the 15th
7 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/ , accessed on September
the 15th

The second was his fathers death, to whom he was very close. He took the loss very
hard, so he sought treatment at Tavistock Clinic in London. There he met and was treated by
the well renowed British psychoanalyst, Dr. Wilfred Brion and he also assisted at a lecture by
Dr. Carl Jung, that highly influenced Becketts later works, among which the famous Waiting
for Godot, Watt and All that Fall9.
At the beginning of 1938, Samuel Beckett moved once again to Paris and reestablished his relation with the Irish author James Joyce. The friendship with James Joyce
left a lasting impression on Beckett as it was through his acquaintance with the older Irish
writer that he seriously began to define his own work (Weiss, Anderson and Graley 2011: 2).
He also became friends with several artists, such as the Italian Swiss sculptor and
painter Alberto Giacometti and the French painter, sculptor and writer Marcel Duchamp10.
During World War II, Beckett joined the French Resistance and when the war was
nearly finished, he returned to Ireland. In 1961 he married Suzzane, who has been his life long
companion, with whom he grew old. They both died in 1989; Samuel Beckett died on the
22nd of December, just five months after his wife and they are interred at the Cimitire de
Montparnasse in Paris11.

8 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/ , accessed on September

the 15th
9 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/ , accessed on September
the 15th
10 http://www.biography.com/people/samuel-beckett-9204239, accessed on
September the 15th
11 http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/, accessed on
September the 7th