In mid-1936 he wrote to Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their apprentice. In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. In 1935-the year that he successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates-Beckett worked on his novel Murphy. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.
Eliot, and the French symbolists as their precursors. They focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.īeckett published essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1992). Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in The Dublin Magazine in 1934:īeckett travelled throughout Europe. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience. It was a literary parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be "at odds with all that is clear and distinct in Descartes". In November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme.
In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. The next year he won a small literary prize for his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition. Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia. The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams). In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled "Dante. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Luce, who introduced him to the work of Henri Bergson ). The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland raised as an Anglican, Beckett later became agnostic, a perspective which informed his writing.īeckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors was the Berkeley scholar A. At the age of five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in Dublin. Beckett had one older brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Foxrock suburb of Dublin on 13 April 1906, the son of William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse. 11.4 Translation collections and long works.