Samuel Beckett was born on 13 April 1906, the son of a chartered surveyor living comfortably in Foxrock, Co. Dublin, and grandson of a builder who was responsible for erecting the prestigious National Library of Ireland - in other words, a member of the comfortably-off middle-class of Dublin Protestant society which continued to populate the professions in some strength after Irish Free State was established in 1922. Given the origins of that state in Catholic nationalist democracy, Beckett’s parents’ class found itself politically marginalised though neither economically dispossessed or socially disadvantaged as in more radical revolutions elsewhere. On the contrary: it retained a certain sense of superiority, if also conscious of an anomalous relation to the English ‘mother-land’ that often caused its members to feel a closer affinity with their Catholic compatriots in the south than with the predominantly Presbyterian unionists of Northern Ireland.

Although Bill Beckett took his son to see GPO burning Rising from the hills overlooking the city in the 1916, there was no sense of sympathy with the occupants of that building or their cause, more a sense of horror at the extensive damage done to the Irish capital. Nor would that change after independence; for, like most Irish Protestants of the period, the Becketts were separate from the majority of the population by religion and political affiliations - respectively Anglican and Unionist by tradition. For all this, they did not consider themselves less than Irish majority, and only disowned the epithet ‘Irish’ when it was expropriated by the Nationalist agenda to mean Gaelic and Catholic, rural and tradition as distinct from Anglo-Irish, modern, urban and Protestant or any combination of these. If Bill Beckett voted for Cumann na Gael as a defensive measure against the republican extremism of Fianna Fáil which he most feared, his son Samuel cynically offering to poll a vote for the same party if he was paid five pounds for doing so. Otherwise, he was ruled by complete indifference as to Irish political divisions.

Like his brother Frank, Samuel was sent to Portora Royal College in Dungannon, one of the very few so-called ‘‘public schools’’ in Ireland - meaning in the English fashion the diametrical opposite of the common-sense understanding of the term - i.e., a public school for the upper classes as distinct from private tuition in an aristocratic household. Oscar Wilde had been there, though Portora did not advertise that fact because of the scandal that still surrounded him. (Today the majority of pupils at Portora are from Hong Kong.)

Beckett retained no affection for Portora though his abilities at sport made it reasonably congenial. Later, during a brief stint as a teacher in a similar establishment in Belfast, he answered the head’s assertion that his boys were the ‘cream of society’ with the rejoinder ‘rich and thick’. The syllabus was conventionally classical, aimed at University matriculation examinations of the period. It was not until Beckett reached Trinity College, Dublin, that his interest in literature actually took fire, as it did under the influence of Professor Rudmore-Brown the professor of French who encouraged him to read the modernist poets. Beckett also played cricket for Dublin University (as TCD is also called) and hence got his name into Wisden’s Almanac - a unique “double” for a Nobel winner.

By the time he graduated with a First Class Degree and Gold Medal in 1927 he had acquired French, German and Italian, he was ready to embark on a doctoral thesis about a group of contemporary French poets called the “Unanimistes”, as Rudmose-Brown has proposed. This was never to be completed. Arriving in Paris that autumn to take up a Sorbonne lectureship organised as an exchange with Dublin, he was introduced to the Irish novelist James Joyce by their mutual friend Thomas MacGreevy, later Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Aside from trips to Kassel in Germany, where he conducted an unhappy affair with his cousin Peggy Sinclair, Beckett settled in as a member of the inter-war literary world in Paris and was often called Joyce’s private secretary in view of his confidential relationship with the doyen of Irish writers.

In 1929 Beckett contributed a keynote essay to Our Exagmination of His Factification Round an Incamination of a Work in Progress - a corporate defence of Finnegans Wake organised by Joyce himself. In 1930 he produced a prize-winning poem called “Whoroscope” and in the the same year he returned to Dublin to take up a junior lecturership at Trinity College - a disasterous experience. His commissioned essay on Marcel Proust appeared in the little Dolphin series, by which time he had published several of the stories that later served as chapters of More Pricks than Kicks (1934). Beckett parted ways with the Joyces when their daughter Lucia fell in love with him, causing him to rebut her with the words: ‘I only come here to see your father’, and it was not until her father finally acknowledged that his daughter was plunging into schizophrenia in the late 1930s that the breach was mended, shortly before the older writer’s death in 1941, as it transpired.

Beckett gave up his briefly-held teaching post at Trinity in 1932, sending a letter of resignation back from Paris. The experience had triggering a range of psychosomatic ailments in him, at least in part ascribable to a stormy relationship with his mother, whose ‘'savage loving’, he afterwards said, ‘made me what I am’. Psycosexual difficulties also emerged in his relationships with women such as Nancy Cunard, Ethna McCarthy and Mary Manning Howe with whom he had affairs in Dublin and in Paris while the fiction he was writing at the time reflected this in the form of characters troubled by alternate bouts of impotence and intense activity. There were other reasons to be upset. Peggy Sinclair - whose sexual prococity and near family relationship disturbed him - died of tuberculosis in 1933 and his own father died later in the year. On the advice of a medical friend, Beckett moved to London to attend the Tavistock Clinic where Jungian psychology was practised. There in 1935 he heard the famous Swiss psychoanalyst telling his audience about a girl with a crippling neurosis: ‘You see, she had never really been born,’ he said in the concluding words of the lecture. This sentence was to be talismanic for Beckett in the future.

At this period Beckett’s intellectual diet embraced René Descartes and his follower Arnold Geulincx whose ideas about the mind/body split fascinated him. Descartes famous sentence about the Cogito which locates selfhood exclusively in the mind and makes the body a vehicle only (“I think therefore I am”) seemed to reflect his own experience. Both Belaqua in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and the title character of Murphy (1938) exhibit dysfunctional patterns of behaviour which properly belonged to the author himself, or - more accurately - stood within easy imaginative reach at the time of writing. Murphy is a ‘seedy solipsist’ who prefers the life of the mind to that of the body while at the same time cohabiting with a girl called Celia who supports the couple by prostitution. At this period Beckett appears to have formed the life-long habit of frequenting prostitutes as suiting his emotional constitution better than relationships with women of his own class.

Murphy, set in London, is more intellectual self-caricature than bildunsroman, of course; but it does capture the disociation of feeling that Beckett apparently experienced where sexual relationships were concerned. Celic loves Murphy; but, though he reciprocates her physical attentions sufficient to sustain the relationship, the love-emotion is simply a nuisance to him and something, moreover, whose very possibility is denied by his convictions. Nor are her attractions so strong that he does not prefer tying himself up in a rocking-chair in order to attain the state in which mind and body separate and breathing stops (apnoia and atarxy are terms variously employed in this description). All of this is laboriously explained in Chapter Six of the novel - a section to which the reader is directed from several other points with the comic air of a jejune philosophical tutorial. Yet, rational as Murphy’s theory of selfhood it may be in purely Cartesian terms, it is this habit of tying himself into a rocking-chair that leads to a fatal accident involving gas-pipes which gives Beckett’s Murphy his quietus. In other words, it is so impractical as to be positively lethal and might even be glossed as an expression of a death-wish on the part of its brilliant by mentally-unstable author.

During the composition of both novels Beckett seemed intent on developing a narrative style that incorporates a good deal of intertextuality (i.e., hyper-clever allusions) and a general air of parody as its comic staple. Dr. Johnson’s augustan manner supplies a good deal of the prose rhythm and renders the narration novel arch and squalid at the same time. The later Beckett would commit himself to a form of interior monologue in which the thoughts (or ‘pensums’) of his troubled characters make up both the content and the form. The difference between the writing in Murphy and that in the Trilogy is enormous - a difference not merely of degree but kind. In Murphy we met this facetious of Miss Counihan, who is called ‘the only nubile amateur in the 26 Counties who does not confuse her self with her body, and one of the few bodies, in the same bog, equal to the distinction’ (Picador Edn., p.121.) In Molloy a typical sentence might read: ‘I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallowed everything, greedily’ (Picador Edn., p.12). From sarcasm to sincerity might be a simplistic but nonetheless a true account of the change that has been wrought here.

If we wonder why Beckett adopted such a forced literary manner at the outset, the answer must be sought in the Irish historical context. The augustan style of writing that shapes so many sentences in the early novels takes its rise - at least in Ireland - from the hey-day of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In echoing it, Beckett shows himself unable or unwilling to immerse himself in the cleansing waters of the Irish literary revival with its professedly authentic (or even ‘native’) voice - though better considered, perhaps, in regard to Yeats, Synge and O’Casey as a specifically literary language. Yet, if he refuses to engage with the credulities of the national movement, he is painfully aware of the groundless superiority of the older dispensation for which such a haughty style is the conceited vehicle, albeit in the ironically inverted form in which he uses it. In so far as the sentences of his early novels embody this contradiction they are imbued on the one hand with an air of ethnic derision and on the other a sardonic hauteur so inflated that it seems about to explode.

Clearly this kind of writing is not at all the formula for a wide and popular readership in Ireland or anywhere else where patriotism and piety are in large supply. That is very much the point: it is a manner designed to give expression to a form of disillusionment which even-handedly repudiates the sentimental self-regard of the newly-emerging nation and the polite disparagements of the older civility which has been cast down - or, at least, marginalised - by national revolution. (The fact that it was, in practice, a petty-bourgeois revolution, in a way that a radical adjustment of social values would not.) The way to dissociate the writer from both of these is to mix hyper-intellectualism with overtly erotic and even scatological effects which the conventional decencies of popular literature and high culture equally preclude. Murphy and Belaqua, the characters who serve as vehicles for this concoction, are unaccountably well-versed in the writings of Dante, Descartes, Geulincx and Schopenhauer, just as their author is. That sort of autodidacticism had been a feature of modern Irish literature since Joyce but, taken to the extreme to which Beckett takes it, it becomes a sort of challenge to the reader: swallow this, if you can.

Some examples will serve to illustrate the point. The final story of More Pricks than Kicks, for instance, concerns the accidental castration of the hero and bears the title ‘‘Che Sciagura [What a Misfortune]’’, being the expression Dante uses when the same event befalls his character Belaqua in the Inferno - hence combining literary allusion with profound indelicacy and a certain callous disregard for ordinary feeling. Similarly, Murphy’s theory of mind/body separation is founded on Descartes’ famous identification of the self with the thinking mind, as we have seen, and quite specifically with Geulincx’s more radical notion that the mind and body, so far from being connected through the pineal gland (as Descartes liked to believe), are merely parallel phenomena with no actual connection like two clocks set to the same time, their relation to each other being an illusion maintained by the great clockmaker, God.

Beckett’s use of such ideas heralds a parody of rationalism in later works where trampish characters apply the principles of mathematics, and especially the theory of surds - based on the observation that the square root is an infinite regress - to hilarious effect. These personages, for whom every moment is a milestone on the road to dissolution, are equipped with a battery of objects that serve to foster the transparent illusion of control in a world that is actually uncontrolled and uncontrollable. The paraphenalia of bicycles - perhaps the perfect rationalist invention - pebbles or ‘sucking stones’, bowler hats, carrots and so on which parsimoniously serve as the recurrent furnishing of the Beckettian world are exponents of an obsession with the mensurable aspect of the material world. Having conducted a disquisition on the frequency with which he breaks wind during a twenty-four hour cycle, Molloy says:

It is not hard to see that the correlation between mathematics and selfhood in which the rationalist philosophers put such store is ultimately meaningless. That science possesses a privileged view of the universe around us and ourselves as species dwelling in it is a fundamental cornerstone of the rationalist faith. Beckett’s novels are in one aspect a refutation of this: what escapes the purely mathematical is the purely human -for - as Molloy later says in response to those high expectations:

The voice may be embraced as a human voice, though not without a comic grain that borders on the satirical, and therefore a comic will that detaches itself from pure suffering to sound the distinctive note of intellectual revenge. Nevertheless, we recognise that the paring-down of language has been brought to the point, in the Trilogy, where only the immediate givens of thought and sensation enter in and all the superfoetations (to borrow a Beckettian term) of attitude and opinion have been swept away.

To reach this position, Beckett had to undergo a very real transformation. His own account of this was given in an interview with Charles Juliet in the early 1970s. In discussing the new departure that is the novels of the Trilogy, he said: ‘I had to eliminate all the poisons [...] and find the right language.’

(Transcribing this Juliet characterises those ‘poisons’ as ‘intellectual decencies, knowledge, certainties’ and so forth.) In relating this, Beckett spoke of a moment in 1946 when, at the end of the pier in Dun Laoghaire (Co. Dublin), he found himself gazing out into the darkness at the absolute nothingness that was to be his subject. This was a major turning point as well as a profound experience, even a ‘miracle’ - as he did not hesitate to call it when he later invoked the episode in Krapp's Last Tape, as we shall see in a moment.

Beckett also told Juliet that he began writing Molloy in his mother’s house, so the novel is to that extent autobiographical in substance, or at least - more strictly speaking - auto-diegetic (that is, the author writing about himself whether the details are true and accurate or not). What is more, the Beckett supplied grounds for identifying this transforming experience with the one recorded by the title-character in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958):

That play speaks of the price of seeing ‘the whole thing’ in terms of alienation from others, and specifically in terms of the abuse of love and friendship offered by a woman. (In his own life, Beckett lived with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil from before the war, eventually marrying her in 1961, though their relationship grew to be companionate and he had continued to have affairs with other women notably with Barbara Bray, a journalist he met in London.) In more expressly spiritual and literary terms, however, it speaks of a sudden baring of the elements of a career and a grasping in one vivid moment of perception both the purpose and the method - however desperate and anti-literary - by which that mission must be carried on.

It is possible to imagine that moment, even to affirm its resemblance to the common human experience of visionary awareness when the significance of one’s life or career suddenly appears in a light of great certainty, however evanescently or wordless the apparition. It is also possible to compare it with the Joycean conception of epiphany, or the common reception of that term as a moment of enlightenment about the self or about the world around us. More importantly, however, we must grasp its negativity in the special sense that it is a knowledge about nothingness which conveyed to Beckett the idea that it was perfectly consistent with the purposes of his art to maintain that there was ‘there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express' - as we have seen him assert already in his essay on Marcel Proust. (Proust [... &c.], London: Calder, p.103.)

He asserted it, but assertion is not the same thing as self-transforming realisation of the idea in relation to the givens of his own experience considered as materials for art. When it came in that shape it carried him rapidly away from the literary practices of his early comic-novel period - burgeoning with underdeveloped tragedy as those novels may have been - and away too from the unavoidable pressure of James Joyce’s influence upon his nascent art. Yet, at the same time, by a crucial paradox, it carried him back into the determining nexus of his own Irish nurture, but this time without the threat of sentimentality and with a real sense of the tragic element in the Irish historical experience. It is in this connection that Beckett's mature works, whether in prose or drama, can be claimed as monuments of Irish literature.