From sporty teenager to free-thinking writer

Beckett's early years at Trinity College transformed him, writes Terence Killeen

The Samuel Beckett who emerged from Trinity College Dublin on his graduation in 1927 was a very different person from the one who entered it as a 17-year-old undergraduate in 1923. This is of course true of most people who go through the university experience at a young and impressionable age. But in Beckett's case, the difference is especially acute: he went to Trinity as a fairly average, if rather moody, member of the Dublin higher bourgeoisie: good at sport, reasonably good at school subjects, having thoroughly absorbed the ethos of an elite boarding school, in his case Portora Royal School in Enniskillen.

An indication of the kind of person he saw himself as being is shown by the career preferences he expressed on his entry to the college: law or chartered accountancy (very close to his father's profession). He left Trinity College in a state of thorough alienation from his own background, of growing disenchantment with his family and with a commitment to explorations in art and literature that would take him far from his social and familial context.

Trinity College itself, where Beckett enrolled for an arts degree, played an important part in this transformation. It is a lazy cliche to suppose that the college in those days was merely a bastion of privilege and of the ancien regime in an Ireland that had changed utterly around it. In fact it contained a number of individuals who quite transcended this stereotyped image. Foremost among these was the professor of Romance languages (essentially French), TB Rudmose-Brown. Unconventional, witty, acute, a free thinker in every sense, neither an imperialist nor a nationalist, and devoted to French literature, Rudmose-Brown inspired and guided Beckett in his early interests and lifelong attitudes: a commitment to free inquiry and a hatred of censorship and repression in any form. It was through Rudmose-Brown that Beckett developed his love for early 20th-century French literature, above all Proust; Beckett's mentor was unusual also in those days in his openness to contemporary writing.

Beckett's honours subjects were French and Italian: in Italian his main inspiration was not the professor, Walter Starkie, for whom he had little time, but a private teacher, Bianca Esposito, with whom he explored the writer who was arguably the most important influence on him, Dante.

In addition to these honours subjects, he also studied some maths, Latin (the course was broader in those days) and, most importantly, English literature for two years. In this course he read the canonical English classics, including Shakespeare and Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

I now own Beckett's copies of the first two books of The Faerie Queene and it would appear from them that his study of the work was not particularly diligent: there are very few annotations, though one passage that did catch his eye was Book 2, Canto IX, Stanza 22, the description of Maleger: a finely gothic portrayal which the young Beckett notes as "An example of Spensers psychology".

There is also a list of passages to be learnt by heart, something no lecturer would ask of students these days.

BECKETT CAME TO Trinity with a good sporting pedigree, having played rugby, cricket and boxing, among other sports, in Portora: he pursued these activities with considerable success while at Trinity. He also took up golf, playing both for the college and at Carrickmines golf club as a student member, often with his friend Bill Cunningham. He excelled, however, at cricket, participating in the Dublin University cricket team's two tours of England, in 1926 and 1927, when they played Northamptonshire. Famously, he is the only Nobel laureate to grace the pages of Wisden, the cricketer's almanac. He was also a member of the Dublin University Motor Cycle Club, and was apparently a fearless rider. He retained a strong interest in sport all his life and played rugby in Paris in the early days: he fared less well there because the matches were played on Sundays and he was often hung over on that day.

Beckett became a Trinity Scholar (the highest distinction possible for an undergraduate) in 1926, and in October 1927 obtained first place and a gold medal in Modern Literature in his final Moderatorship exams in French and Italian.

Graduation did not end Beckett's connection with Trinity: after a hiatus of one year, he went on to become the college's exchange lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from late 1928 to summer 1930 - a crucial period for the young Irishman during which he became friendly with James Joyce, became an object of obsession for Joyce's daughter Lucia and began to discover his own vocation as a writer. The understanding was that following his Paris experience Beckett would return to Trinity as a lecturer in French, working under Rudmose-Brown. This duly happened and Beckett seemed set fair for a distinguished academic career. It was not to be, however: his brief time as a lecturer (four terms) was a disaster.

It is clear from the evidence of former students in James and Elizabeth Knowlson's recent Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett and from other sources that being lectured by this strange young man was, as is said, an interesting experience. It was not necessarily an enlightening one, still less an inspiring one. Some students responded better than others; but for a few, at least, there were elements of indifference and even disdain in Beckett's approach that must have been dispiriting. On his side, he hated what he had landed himself into doing and was having considerable family difficulties at the time.

SO IT MUST HAVE come as a relief to all concerned when he bailed out of Trinity at Christmas 1931, departing to Germany and resigning from a distance. (Many years later, when he met the provost of Trinity, Dr WA Watts, Beckett expressed his guilt about his failure to return a college key which he took with him; at the time, he felt very badly about having let down Rudmose-Brown, and, especially, his parents, who had been understandably very proud of their son's academic achievements.) Thus ended Beckett's brief and implausible academic career; it seems likely that the hilarious but also rather scathing satire on academic life and research in the third chapter of Watt is some kind of verdict on his own experience.

However, this was not the end of Beckett's connection with Trinity, or of his debt to it. One element that he certainly took with him, and never forgot, was the friendships he made while there.

It was in Trinity that he met AJ Leventhal, his far more successful successor as lecturer in French; and Alfred Péron, who came to the college as a lecturer in French in 1926 and was to die at the hands of the Nazis, both of whom were to become very close friends. (Beckett was highly selective in his friendships, but once made, he was fiercely loyal to them.) Above all, it was through - though not actually in - Trinity College that he met Thomas MacGreevy, in many ways the closest friend of his life, and the person to whom he revealed more of himself than to anyone else.

By a happy stroke of fate, Beckett's letters to MacGreevy, by far his most important correspondence, now repose in Trinity College library. The college has also benefited from Beckett's own bequests of manuscripts and workbooks and from many other Beckett-related donations, such as the recently acquired papers of Bettina Jonic.

In 1959, Trinity conferred an honorary degree on Beckett, the only one he accepted. His attitude to it is best summed up in a letter to his friend Con Leventhal: "I don't underestimate it nor pretend I am not greatly moved, but I have a holy horror of such things and it is not easy for me." Difficult though it was, however, Beckett went through with it and found it far less disagreeable than he had feared. A debt was owed, not just to Trinity but perhaps to the memory of his parents as well: andit had now been handsomely repaid.

laborum.