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It was from Joyce that he also learned to use silence as a weapon against critical attacks. The relief he felt upon removing them is echoed later in Waiting for Godot where Estragon pulls off his misshapen boots. Imitating Joyce, Beckett began to wear pointed-toe patent leather pumps which were too small for his feet because he wanted to wear the same size that Joyce wore. It was also during this period in Paris that he met James Joyce with whom he maintained a rather fragile relationship until the latter’s death in 1941. After another trip to Europe the following year, he returned to wear a French beret and to pepper his speech with Gallicisms.įrom 1928 to 1930 he lived in Paris as a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure during which time he visited his Aunt Cissie in Germany where his exposure to a bohemian lifestyle made its mark on his own casual attire. His initial interest in France developed from a bike tour on the continent in 1926 and was reinforced by the influence of Alfred Peron, an exchange lecturer in French at Trinity from 1926 to 1928. During his college days he was often sick, a heavy drinker, and a lover of films, particularly those of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and later the Marx Brothers. He entered Trinity College at age seventeen and eventually earned the coveted Foundation Scholarship in 1926 in Modern Languages for French, Italian, and Spanish. Throughout his youth he was withdrawn and moody, yet athletic and a leader when involved in sports. His last religious emotion was felt at his first Communion. At the moment of crisis it has no more depth than an old school tie” (Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Columbia University Forum, Vol. My mother and brother got no value from their religion when they died. For me it was only irksome and I let it go. He was not a religious person, claiming “I have no religious feeling. The conflict with May created a great deal of anguish for Sam as he knew that he was supposed to love her. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich: New York, 1978,15). The result was a pair of badly singed eyebrows and a severe beating from his mother (Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett. On one occasion, he dropped a lighted match into a can of gasoline as he peered into it to see what would happen. While Frank, his older brother, was an obedient child, Sam was not, always doing daring things which earned him frequent beatings from his mother. However, the dislike that he felt for his disciplinarian mother was somewhat compensated for by the love that he felt for his easy-going father. He and his mother argued constantly from his early youth until her death. Sam was raised in Cooldrinagh, a three-story Tudor house located to the south of Dublin.
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He was of middle class stock, his father, William (Bill) Frank Beckett, Jr., being a contractor, and his mother, Mary (May) Roe, the daughter of a gentleman. Originally known as Becquet, his French Huguenot ancestors moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century for religious and economic reasons. Samuel Beckett claimed to have been born on Good Friday, April13, 1906.