Writers

Samuel Beckett

More Pricks than Kicks (1934) Dublin

'Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted a simple cantilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along beneath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more.'

TIMELINE

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Lifepath
Samuel Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 at Cooldrinagh,  in Foxrock, an affluent suburb of Dublin. His parents William and Mary were upper class Protestants, his father worked as a quantity surveyor and inherited a construction business. Beckett boarded in private schools, before matriculating in 1923 to Trinity College Dublin where he read French, Italian and immersed himself deeply in Dante Alighiere’s  (1266-1321) Divine Comedy  trilogy. 

In 1928 he undertook a two-year fellowship as lectuer d’ anglais  at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Between 1928 and 1929 Paris witnessed a proliferation of small private presses and alternative journals which benefited Beckett’s early literary efforts. He collaborated with James Joyce and frequented the book store  Shakespeare & Co.  In 1930,  Beckett won a first prize for a poem on the subject of Time. Entitled Whoroscope the piece centred on the life of  Descartes, and led to a commission for a study entitled Proust, in which Beckett would dissect the modern concept of time, which would by consequence, influence Beckett’s increasingly fragmented representation of space in his subsequent works. Returning to a Trinity lectureship in French the same year Beckett shortly concluded his teaching position constituted a ‘grotesque comedy’ (1) . Living in a city centre room at college he felt socially alienated from the Dublin literati and the  cultural nationalism of the Free State.

In 1931 Beckett resigned from Trinity and travelled to Paris where he spent the spring and summer of 1932 completing an unpublished novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Unable to secure a publishing deal in France, Beckett travelled to London where publishers also rejected his manuscript, leaving him bereft. He returned to Dublin and spent 1933 re-drafting his manuscript into stories which were published as More Pricks than Kicks in May 1934. Beckett’s collection was banned in Ireland under the 1929 Censorship Act.  Beckett  had composed the majority his stories between ‘the bad years’ of 1931 and 1933.  Suffering from boils and panic attacks he agonised over resigning from Trinity College and was estranged from his mother May., Beckett’s emotional penumbra occurred with the death of his father William, in June 1933, to whom he was especially close.  Soon after, Beckett suffered a breakdown near Trinity College: 

‘After my father’s death I had trouble psychologically [. . . ] I’ll tell you how it was. I was walking down Dawson Street. And I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found I couldn’t go on moving. So I went into the nearest pub and got a drink just to stay still’ (2) .  

Seeking medical advice, Beckett was told to travel to London, as he recalled: ‘psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at that time. It was not legal’ (3). Between 1933 and 1935 Beckett underwent treatment at the Tavistock Clinic in London and composed his novel Murphy which after 47 or so rejections was published in 1938. He returned to Dublin in 1936 and found his native country culturally stifling. Acting as a witness in a libel trial in 1937 at the Four Courts, he was publicly pilloried in the Irish press: ‘The Dublin evening papers carried banner headlines: THE ATHEIST FROM PARIS’ (4).

He recalled in later years: ‘I didn’t like living in Ireland. You know the kind of thing –theocracy, censorship of books, that kind of thing’ (5).  The eruption of the Second World War in 1939 caused Ireland to adopt a policy of neutrality, designated as the ‘Emergency.’  As a result Beckett returned to Paris and later joined the French Resistance in response to the Nazi  persecution of  Jewish friends and colleagues. An informer caused him to take refuge from the Gestapo in the village of Roussillon in Vichy France until 1945.  It was during this time that  he started to write in the French.

Sources

Samuel Beckett described the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) as a collection of ‘bottled climates.’  The stories convey vivid impressions of  1920s and 1930s Dublin. Beckett’s stories are conveyed  through the eyes of a marginalised figure named Belacqua Shuah ‘an unprepossessing figure with     [. . . ]  ruined feet, recurrent impetigo, capon belly and [a] habit of picking his nose’ (1). Belacqua  is a slothful student of Dante at Trinity College, and his peregrinations  through the streets of Dublin often commence from the public toilets under the Thomas Moore Statue and the ‘hot bowels of McLouglin’s’ pub (2) adjoining the front gates of Trinity College whose motto ‘Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum’ (It will last into endless future times) (3) underscores Beckett’s evolving ideas of the role of  the repetitious nature of  time, its influence on the fragmented perception of space, and the embodied practices intimated by the bodily metaphors in his stories. In Ding-Dong  Beckett frames

‘. . . the sunset up the Liffey till all the colour had been harried from the sky, all the tulips and aerugo expunged’ (4),  

as a euphoric space which conflues in a story titled A Wet Night with Belacqua’s perception of the misty neon streetscape of College Green: ‘Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases’ (5), in  repetitious sequence.The presence of civil offices, places of commerce and traffic imprint themselves upon Belacqua’s consciousness as he  makes his way,

'Down Pearse Street, that is to say, long straight Pearse Street, its vast Barrack of Glencullen granite, its home of tragedy restored and enlarged, its coal merchants and Florentined Fire Brigade Station, its two Cervi saloons, ice-cream and fried fish, its dairies, garages and monumental sculptors, and implicit behind the whole length of its southern frontage the College [. . . ] its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along beneath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more’ (6).

Although the character ‘Belacqua was conceived when Beckett was rootless geographically and professionally’(7), in addition to his study of Dante, both Beckett’s native city and his early Joycean influence left a strong imprint on the collection: 'The Dublin background of More Pricks Than Kicks is carefully documented after the manner of Ulysses: the street names, the Liffey, Trinity College and the statue of Thomas Moore, combined to present the busy city landscape against which Belacqua is drawn' (8).

Sources