Beckett – the reluctant lecturer

This recent, short book focuses on one of the least-known periods of Samuel Beckett’s life. The Irish writer had just returned from Paris to teach in Dublin, but had not yet written his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
Rachael Burrows, then aged nineteen, was a student in Beckett’s class when he lectured on French literature in Trinity College Dublin in 1931. Luckily, she kept her lecture notes which recently were discovered in the TCD archives. The manuscript gives us a new insight into Beckett’s thinking and helps us to understand the path he would take later as a writer. On his return from studying in Paris in 1930, Beckett was made a lecturer in TCD. He had a three-year contract, at £200 per year, while proceeding to his PhD with the French Department.

Rachael Burrows scribbled notes quickly into a little notebook during his lectures and they give a unique insight into Beckett’s view of literature, when he was just twenty-five. The notes reveal Beckett’s understanding of French writing and he would never again reveal his tastes so openly.
h4. Paris
Though always an ardent reader, the young Beckett did not display an interest in French drama until he arrived in Trinity as an undergraduate aged seventeen. After TCD, he went to Paris to study from 1928 until 1930. He did not realise when he got to Paris that his life was to change forever.
Two years later, when he returned to Dublin, he had evolved into a brilliant independent thinker who did not like superficial conformity.
While lecturing in TCD in 1931, he came across as a shy, but brilliant thinker. While he liked reading authors like Rimbaud, he did not enjoy talking about them. He was a tall, courteous but self-effacing teacher. Burrows decided to write down Beckett’s lectures as fully as possible. She felt that he was creating as he went along and that, in front of the students, he ‘gave the best of himself’.
Beckett taught his class how to write essays with headings. The first sentence, he advised, must contain all the arguments to be developed. He lectured without notes, in a mixture of English and French. The French writers he covered included Balzac, Proust and Flaubert.
h4. French writers
Balzac was much loved by Irish readers. But not by Beckett who, according to Rachael Burrows, preferred Flaubert and Proust. Beckett liked Flaubert’s impersonality and he saw the French writer as the real ancestor of the modern novel, not Balzac.
In his lectures, Beckett aligned himself with the ‘Modern’ writers and distanced himself from his Irish contemporaries. Beckett loved absence of purpose as he felt that this best expresses the human condition. For him, Balzac was too predictable.
The Dubliner also liked Proust because he preserved ‘complexity’. The three attributes of a good writer, according to Beckett, were originality, genius and unpredictability.
h4. European tradition
Samuel Beckett always saw himself as drawing on a wider European tradition. Rachael Burrows believed that Beckett’s tastes were already formed by the time that she was taught by him. The classes that Beckett lectured to were thirty-strong and were composed mainly of women.
Always punctual, he spoke with his back to the window gazing upward and without expression. However, the teacher was deeply unhappy. At night he would sit in his rooms and drink Jameson, and occasionally eat a scrambled egg. He had no desire to be in Dublin or excel in his job. He had little social life and found his situation intolerable.
According to Anthony Cronin, he saw life lecturing as a life of misery. He was gloomy and withdrawn and in dress he became increasingly dishevelled.
He also suffered from panic attacks. His doctor told him to smoke fewer of the Wills’ Woodbines that he bought in a green cardboard packet of twenty, at eight pence a packet. Before the end of the summer term, he had suffered a bout of pleurisy.
Later, his friend Dr Geoffrey Thompson, of Baggott Street Hospital, would try to help him deal with his increasing health worries. Geoffrey’s brother, Allen, of the Richmond Hospital, would later help Beckett get back to France as a member of the Irish Red Cross.
Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, told Beckett that he ‘should accept the world and go to parties’. But when he went out now, it was to the less frequented haunts on Pearse Street or Westland Row where Kennedy’s, in Lincoln Place, was his favourite.
h4. Dr Ethna McCarthy
Beckett did not go abroad during the summer holidays of 1931. At this time, he was still occasionally seeing Ethna McCarthy, later to study medicine and specialise in paediatrics. By Christmas, he had finally slipped away to Germany and, from there, sent his letter of resignation to the College, causing consternation.
His former students remember a distressed Trinity professor telling them that he had just received a letter from Beckett informing him that he would not be back for the spring term of 1932.
The professor added that Beckett did not say what he was doing or where he was going.
h4. James Joyce
Other students of Samuel Beckett in the French Department were contacted by Beckett’s biographer, Professor Knowlson. One student remembers the lecturer never spoke of James Joyce. Another knew that she ‘was in the presence of someone outstanding’. Yet another student remembered ‘our Sam’ as ‘a tall, thin streak of misery’. When Beckett disappeared, she was told that he ‘had gone to Paris to commit suicide’. Another student confided that she had ‘thoughts of a romantic kind’ about the tall, blue-eyed lecturer.
Some of his former students, however, worried that they were so bad at French that they had caused him to leave. When interviewed later about her notes, Rachael Burrows said, “When you see him, tell him I have always had a great sadness in my heart that this brilliant man still thinks he was a bad lecturer.”
h4. Prof Eoin O’Brien
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which was written just after Beckett’s brief teaching stint, failed to find a publisher in his lifetime. The book, edited by Professor Eoin O’Brien, was published in 1992.
Beckett saw Joyce as heroic and epic, but when he first met the ‘Master’ he did not intend to be a writer. This came about when he realised in Dublin, in 1931, that he could never be teacher. At just seventy pages, this book sheds light on a shadowy period of the life of one of the greatest writers of all time. The reluctant lecturer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This newly-published, short book gives us an important insight into Beckett before Beckett. Through the recently discovered lecture notes, the young writer’s voice reaches us today.
* Beckett before Beckett (2008) by Brigitte Le Juez, is published by Souvenir Press, London. The famous Gate Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, with Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy, has been touring 40 venues across Ireland until the end of October.
* Dr John Wallace contributed to Centenary Shadows of Samuel Beckett, published by David Hale, London.