Beckett

in Context: 1. Childhood and Portora

Russell Smith

Introduction
This chapter can do no more than give a very brief sketch of Becketts childhood and schooldays, indicating in broad terms some of the strategies by which Beckett reworked autobiographical material in his writing. Readers interested in more detail should consult the biographical studies discussed below. By way of an introduction, however, I would like to outline a four-part schema by which these questions might be considered. It involves issues of presence and absence, of specific references and more generalised themes. First, then, is the question of specific presences. Scholars have often noted how Becketts mature writing, from the period of Watt onwards, say, constructs an abstracted world radically divorced from specific historical and geographical contexts, but in which, nevertheless, tiny concrete details and allusions remain names or unique characteristics of people and placeswhich become all the more resonant for their comparative rarity. This tension is developed most explicitly in Company, where one on his back in the dark (Nohow On 3) listens to a voice speaking of a scene from childhood Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular (Nohow On 16). The Ballyogan Road (near Becketts childhood home) functions as an indicator of specificity per se; the place-name is in lieu of (in the place of) no-place. Becketts contextual details often have this ghostly quality, both necessary and arbitrary. Second, there is the question of specific absences. This is a complex strategy, whereby Becketts texts draw attention to specific lacunae, suggesting that what is not there is sometimes more important than what is. To give one example, Phil Baker has shown that all three postage stamps mentioned in Molloy are real stamps, but while two are accurately described, the one that is not described, your new Timor, the five reis orange (Trilogy 109), which Moran demands to see and which his son has hidden, shows an image of an upright-looking man with a moustache (Baker 37); it is an occluded portrait, in other words, of Moran himself, and indeed of Becketts own father. Third, there is the question of thematic presences, that is, more meaningful events or situations (not just details) that are reworked, sometimes repeatedly, through Becketts oeuvre. James Knowlson relates in the Preface to his biography how he confronted Beckett, who had insisted on a separation between his life and his work, with numerous examples of repeated childhood scenes. Beckett nodded in agreement: Theyre obsessional, he said (Knowlson xx-xxi). There

Beckett in Context are two examples that scholars often comment on (see S.E. Gontarskis Introduction to Nohow On, xvii-xx). One is a scene where Becketts father took him to the Forty Foot, a swimming hole near Dublin, and taught him to swim by ordering him to dive into the water. The scene is repeated in various forms throughout Becketts writing life, from the uncollected poem For Future Reference (1930), through Watt and Eleutheria to Company, written when Beckett was in his seventies. The thematic core of the scene involves the childs fear and the fathers stern command to Be a brave boy (Nohow On 12). A second example involves a small boy out walking with his mother, asking a curious question and receiving a cutting retort, which is treated with significant variations in The End, Malone Dies and once again in Company. The thematic core here, amidst the shifting lacunae and variations of detail, is a feeling of apparent togetherness suddenly ruptured by the mothers angry response. As we shall see, Becketts memories of his schooldays at Portora are of this type, for while there are few concrete details, scenes of mindless rote learning enforced by punishment are a recurrent theme, especially in The Unnamable. The fourth category is the most difficult: the question of generalised themes that are notably absent from Becketts writing. Beckett always insisted that he had a happy childhood; what can it mean, then, that children are almost entirely absent as characters in Becketts oeuvre? That is, there are no imaginative reconstructions of the experience of childhood and schooldays as we see, for instance, in the opening chapters of Joyces Portrait. The stories of Saposcat in Malone Dies, for instance, are self-consciously presented as fictional, with Malone even warning the reader Nothing is less like me than this patient, reasonable child (Trilogy 193). Another way of putting this might be to say that there is no implicit Bildungsroman or childhood back-story in Becketts mature writing; childhood exists in a separate universe, radically divorced from the present. Seen from the estranged vantage point of adulthood, it appears complicated and compromised by the gaps, distortions, interpolations and embellishments of memory and its vicissitudes. A brief word is in order on Becketts biographers. Deirdre Bair, Becketts first biographer, makes it clear in her Preface that she found it difficult working with Beckett, and throughout the book one can discern an underlying hostility to her subject, by no means a prima facie fault in a biographer. Her 1978 biography was relentlessly criticised in Beckett studies, both for its factual errors and more pointedly for its negative portrayal of Beckett as a deeply disturbed man haunted by a tormented childhood and a lifelong guilt-ridden relationship with his domineering and neurotic mother. James Knowlsons authorised biography (1996) can be seen as a corrective to Bairs account, emphasising Becketts emotional resilience, generosity and compassion, and consistently interpreting the negative aspects of his early years in the redeeming light of futurity. But Bairs biography was begun in 1971, and its depiction of Becketts early years drew on many sources who had died before Knowlson began his account; Becketts and his contemporaries views of their early years would have mellowed in the meantime. Knowlsons biography is faithful to the mature Beckett, while Bairs more tendentious account gives a glimpse of the intense

Russell Smith: Childhood and Portora

sensibility that produced works like The Unnamable. The truth probably lies, as truth is wont to lie, somewhere in between (or nowhere in particular). Lois Gordons unjustly overlooked The World of Samuel Beckett (1996) concentrates on Becketts first forty years, and is particularly good on historical context, while Anthony Cronins Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1997), is astute and engagingly written, especially in its evocation of the Dublin of Becketts childhood. Finally, Eoin OBriens The Beckett Country (1986) meticulously documents in photographs the actual people and places mentioned or alluded to in Becketts work, but is guilty of occasional solecisms such as, writing of the ancient graveyard at Tully near Becketts childhood home, It was this graveyard that Moran chose for his final resting place (OBrien 26). To suggest that the places in Becketts fiction can be visited by a tourist with a map seems a radical misreading of Becketts project as a whole.

Foxrock
To begin at the beginning is never simple, and in Becketts case there are two difficulties. The first, thankfully, has been set to rest: Samuel Beckett was born in the front room of his family home on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. However, his birth was not registered until two months later, on 14 June, with the birth certificate giving his birth-date as 13 May, leading Bair to speculate whether this uncanny conjunction of Good Friday and Friday the thirteenth was myth-making on Becketts part (Bair 1-2). The birth notice in the Irish Times of 16 April 1906 (reproduced in Dukes 5) proves that Becketts version is correct. The second problem is more difficult, for Beckett repeatedly claimed to have memories of his pre-natal existence. My memoirs begin under the table, on the eve of my birth, when my father gave a dinner party & my mother presided, he wrote to Arland Ussher in 1937 (Letters 474). He told John Gruen in 1970: I have a clear memory of my own foetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to (qtd in Cronin 2, see also Knowlson and Knowlson 68). It seems that Beckett took these claims seriously. Prenatal memories of this kind are, however, impossible. While the foetus has a memory and undergoes various kinds of learning in utero, autobiographical memoriesthat is, explicit recollections of events or episodesdo not begin until the age of three or older. Such false memories are well known in psychoanalysis, where analysands produce memoriesin which they genuinely believein an effort to please the analyst and advance the analysis. Moreover, many early childhood memories are likely to involve confabulation, where individuals confuse actual memories and knowledge of events gained from others. Indeed, the Unnamable recognises the creative and collaborative nature of childhood memory: Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle (Trilogy 326). Though its appealing to imagine Beckett in utero scowling behind his spectacles at the inanity of dinner-party chitchat, it is a fantasy on Becketts part, and tells us more about the adult Beckett than the unborn child. In its rejection of the idea of the womb as a lost 3

Beckett in Context Eden, it shows Becketts insistence on understanding suffering as an ontological given, not a psychological contingency. Becketts father, William Frank Beckett (1871-1933) was a successful quantity surveyor, a mans man of practical good sense and robust energy, with a ready wit, but also a fiery temper (Knowlson 10). He was an excellent swimmer and keen golfer, but his greatest love was of long walks through the hills around Dublin, especially on Sunday mornings when, while May attended Tullow Parish Church, Bill would go to church with the birds up in the mountains (Knowlson 24). His early death plunged his younger son into profound depression, and Becketts writing is repeatedly haunted by the wordless companionship of their walks together; they were absolutely tuned in remembered Becketts cousin Sheila Roe (Knowlson 12). Memories of these walks in the Dublin hills provide the only moments of quasi-spiritual experience in Becketts writing. But Bill Beckett was, in his sons words, absolutely non-intellectual (Knowlson 10). Though he would have impressed upon his son the traditional manly virtues of courage, resilience and emotional self-restraint, there was another side to Bill Beckett. In his late twenties, as the son of a prosperous Protestant family, Bill had fallen in love with Eva Murphy, the daughter of a prominent Catholic businessman. Both families were appalled at the prospect of a marriage, and the girl was forced to renounce her lover at her mothers deathbed and hastily married off to an elderly Catholic surgeon (see Cronin 6). Bill lapsed into what would now be called depression and was admitted to the Adelaide Hospital with pneumonia, where he was nursed by a tall, thin, serious and practical girl, Maria Roe, known as May, and they were married within a year. But according to Mary Manning, a close childhood friend of Becketts, Bill never got over his first love (Knowlson 13). By contrast with the more familiar image of his manly bonhomie, this story would have left a profound impression of masculine vulnerability and lasting hurt, though it is never directly evoked in Becketts writing. May Beckett (1871-1950) came from a once-wealthy County Kildare family that fell on hard times, and when her father, Samuel Robinson Roe, died when May was fifteen, the family was in such financial straits that she had gone nursing to ease the burden. Though an ill-sorted couple, Bill was seen as a good match and they were married on 31 August 1901. The house Bill Beckett built for his new bride, Cooldrinagh, in the fashionable suburb of Foxrock, was a three-storey Tudor home with tennis court, croquet lawn, summerhouse, stables and extensive lawns and gardens. May was of a puritanical but also rather mercurial temperament, extremely strict and demanding, with a rigid sense of decorum and a fierce temper, but also capable of acerbic wit, and even moments of elation that contrasted forcibly with her periods of dark depression and self- imposed isolation (Knowlson 5). She was threatened with expulsion during her convent schooldays for talking to a boy over the back wall, an episode she sometimes referred to as a married woman, and of which she seemed rather proud (Cronin 8). In her married life, however, she displayed the intolerant perfectionism of the religious temperament, and, as Cronin observes, despite Becketts claim to have little sympathy with this outlook, he would inherit this extremism rather than his fathers adaptability and moderation (Cronin 13).

Russell Smith: Childhood and Portora

Becketts relationship with his motherI am what her savage loving has made me he confided to his friend Tom McGreevy (Letters 552)is a source of constant dispute in Beckett studies. You might say I had a happy childhood, Beckett once said, although I had little talent for happiness. My parents did everything that they could to make a child happy. But I was often lonely. We were brought up like Quakers. My father did not beat me, nor did my mother run away from home (Reid 64; qtd in Bair 13). Bair astutely detects a sly message here: for as the marriage progressed, Becketts father was increasingly away from home, spending his evenings in the club and his weekends walking in the hills, while his mother almost certainly beat him, though how fiercely and how often is a significant point of variance between Bairs and Knowlsons accounts (Bair 13; Knowlson 19-20). Whatever form they took, Mays frequent punishments seem only to have ingrained more deeply her sons rebellious and risk-taking temperament (Knowlson 21-2). However, although she sternly disapproved of her sons artistic ambitions and bohemian lifestyle, and they had blazing rows whenever during his adult life he stayed at Cooldrinagh, she supported him financially and paid for his two-year course of intensive psychoanalysis, a generous act for someone of her religious convictions and social mores. Nevertheless, going by the prima facie evidence of Becketts work, mother figures are often treated with hostility and aggression, sometimes of an extraordinarily violent nature. Though it would be wrong to read this as straightforwardly autobiographical, it would be equally disingenuous simply to follow Molloys advice if you dont mind well leave my mother out of all this (Trilogy 56). This phrase is of course an allusion to Freuds famous formulation in his essay, Negation: You ask who this person in the dream can be. Its not my mother. We emend this to: So it is his mother (Freud 437). Phil Bakers wonderful study Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (1997) convincingly showed, before Becketts notes became available to scholars, how well informed Beckett was about psychoanalytic theory. In particular, Becketts use of themes such as birth trauma and the Oedipus complex are so overt that they become not unconscious symbols which need to be deciphered, but quotations of unconscious symbols which operate on a conscious thematic level and need to be recognised (xvi). This knowingness presents enormous problems for autobiographical and especially psychoanalytic readings of Becketts work. For Baker, Becketts hostile dialogue with psychoanalysis (4) focuses particular aggression on one specific tenet: the formative effect of childhood on the adult (18). So, in terms of maternal aggression, the repressed material is presented in plain view, with no attempt at denial, turning the text inside out in a way which, far from being helpful to the Freudian reader, pre- empts this kind of psychoanalytic reading (16-7). In interpreting the influence of Becketts childhood context on his work, we should be conscious that Becketts treatment of childhood often involves significant exaggeration, distortion, inversion and irony. In terms of the schema outlined above, what is presented most overtly is often carefully crafted to mislead and frustrate the psycho- biographical reader.

Beckett in Context Bairs biography related a childhood incident (told by Becketts cousin Mollie Roe) where Beckett tormented his mother by climbing to the top of a fir tree and throwing himself off to be caught by the lower branches. The scene is reproduced in Company (Nohow On 14-15), written a few years after Bairs biography was published, leading Bair to wonder if the work had truly sprung from Becketts creative vision or if he might have been playing a joke on his biographer and her vision of his life (Bair, Preface, xiii). This dichotomy seems a false one, however; the structure of Company insists that memories are ultimately no more than stories, and whether ones own or others is ultimately undecidable: Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone. As if willing him by this dint to make it his. To confess. Yes, I remember (Nohow On 10). From the age of five until nine, Beckett attended a kindergarten near Foxrock run by the Elsner sisters; memories of the sisters, their cook Hannah and their dog Zulu reappear in Molloy (Knowlson 24-5). From age nine to thirteen Beckett caught the Dublin Slow and Easy from Foxrock to Harcourt Street Station in Dublin, where he attended a larger school at Earlsfort House (Knowlson 30-36); details of this train journey and the two stations recur many times in Becketts works, most notably in All That Fall and Watt (see Knowlson 30-1).

Portora
Beckett attended Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, from Easter term 1920, when he was fourteen, until the latter half of 1923, when he entered Trinity College, Dublin. A primary reason for sending first Frank and then Sam to boarding school was, in Becketts own words, to get us away from the Troubles (Knowlson and Knowlson 21). Beckett remembered being taken by his father, one night during the Easter Rising in 1916, up the Glencullen road to a spot where they could see the flames, an event Beckett later recalled with horror. Over the ensuing weeks, lists of rebels executed in secret by the British appeared daily in the Dublin papers (see Gordon 12-22); in James Stephens memorable words, it was like watching blood seeping from under a locked door (Cronin 36). Gerry Dukes notes that there were 23 separate holdups by Republican irregulars or criminals on the Dublin Slow and Easy line in the course of the Troubles (Dukes 18). Portora was a school on the English public school model, renowned as tough, and offering the predictable package of discipline, prayers, bullying, and appalling food, but also a sound education (Ackerley and Gontarski 450). Often referred to as the Eton of Ireland, the schools song was Floreat Portora, sung to the same tune as Floreat Etona. At the time it was a school of 120 pupils, mostly boarders, who resided in the schools imposing, square-set Georgian buildings, high on a hill overlooking Enniskillen and Lough Erne. Portora Royal School was founded under the terms of a decree issued by James I of England in 1608, according to which there shall be a free school at least in each county, appointed for the education of youth in learning and religion (Portora). Portoras website wryly notes that, although the decree intended 6

Russell Smith: Childhood and Portora

Royal Schools to be built in the county towns, at the time of the proclamation County Fermanagh had no town to which the description county could be applied, in fact it could be said that the county had no settlements to which the description town could be applied (Portora). The original school was therefore established in 1618 at the village of Ballybalfour, 15 miles from Enniskillen. Ballybalfours awkward role in serving as a county town, without any claim to either of these titles, cannot but recall Morans description of the Molloy country centred on Bally (from the Gaelic baile for town or village), comprising a settlement, dignified by some with the name of market-town, by others regarded as no more than a village, and the surrounding country (Trilogy 134). Moran goes on explain the system whereby the terms Bally, Ballyba, and Ballybaba designate, respectively, the town, the town including its environs, and the environs exclusive of the town. In transforming Ballybalfour into Ballybaba, Beckett seems to have drawn on this fragment of Portoran folklore. Beckett excelled at the school in sporting pursuitscricket, rugby, swimming and boxingbut as Portoras archivist David Robertson notes, his academic attainment at Portora was below his true potential, noting that when he left for Trinity in 1923, four of his contemporaries had won awards, but not Beckett (Robertson). His name does not feature on the scroll of academic prize-winners with the now-restored name of Oscar Wilde, boarder from 1864 to 1872, whose name was removed after his conviction for homosexual offences in 1895 (Cronin 40). Becketts concentration on sporting rather than academic achievement was not atypical. A 1910 report by the Intermediate Education Board noted that Attention to sporting activities appeared to have been to the detriment of academic interests (Portora). Beckett made the schools cricket First XI in his first year, distinguishing himself, according to the school magazine, as an attractive batsman, good field, and a very good medium-paced bowler with a sharp break-back. He played halfback in the rugby side from his first year and in 1923 was captain of the First XV, blind without his spectacles, but bold as a lion in the scrum as recalled by Douglas Graham, a contemporary and later headmaster of the school (Peterkin). He was also a member of the schools swimming team and the schools light-heavyweight boxing champion. There are almost no references to cricket, rugby, boxing or swimming in Becketts writing. Beckett appears to have fitted in reasonably well at the school. As a boarder (rather than one of the despised day dogs), a successful sportsman, and with an older brother who was a prefect and captain of the cricket First XI, Becketts social status in the school hierarchy would have been secure. Nevertheless, Becketts schoolmates remember him as moody and withdrawn; photographs typically show him with his head slightly lowered in a disdainful scowl, glowering behind his spectacles. Knowlson reports that during his first term, Beckett was bullied in the library by a gang led by a boy called Clark; Beckett, who had a violent temper, lashed out at the ringleader; having learnt boxing at Earlsfort House and being slightly heavier than Clark, Beckett gave him a savage beating. After that he was left alone (Knowlson 38).

Beckett in Context Although the school was more inclined to reward physical distinction on the playing field and knightliness expressed through the concept of fair play (Cronin 40), it also accorded a certain prestige to intellectual achievement. The then headmaster E.G. Seale awarded a gold medal each year to the winner of an essay competition, an honour which Beckett won three times. It is not known whether Beckett contributed to the school magazine Portora, although a sonnet about a school performance of Haydns Toy Symphony, signed John Peel, shows some features of Becketts style and even includes a reference to Dante (reproduced in OBrien 119). Both Sam and his brother Frank were unusual among their schoolfellows in taking piano lessons, and Sam was remembered for being word-perfect across the range of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He was also a keen chess and bridge player, participated in the school debating society and was an assistant to the school librarian. In short, he seems to have participated across the range of activities on offer. Although never in serious trouble, Beckett was rebellious by inclination and was a ringleader in several pranks. Glimpses of this appear in the characterisation of Sapo in Malone Dies: He boxed and wrestled well, was fleet of foot, sneered at his teachers and sometimes even gave them impertinent answers (190). One of the teachers who left a lasting impression was the science and mathematics master W.N. Tetley, whom Beckett particularly loathed. Geoffrey Thompson remembers Beckett drawing lewd caricatures of Tetley, his face peering right side up from between his buttocks, and casually allowing Tetley to discover them, a streak of malicious daring that shocked his classmates (see Bair 32-4). Tetley is the primary subject of the 1930 poem For Future Referencethat little bullet- headed bristle-cropped / red-faced rat of a pure mathematician(quoted in Harvey 299-301), indicating that Becketts antagonism well outlived Portora (see Cronin 45-7). Eoin OBrien even speculates (116) that Tetley may have contributed to the creation of Basil in The Unnamable: One in particular, Basil I think he was called, filled me with hatred. Without opening his mouth, fastening on me his eyes like cinders with all their seeing, he changed me a little more each time into what he wanted me to be (Trilogy 300). Another memorable episode concerned Thomas Tackaberry, a hopeless disciplinarian who, though in his fifties, was still a junior master. One evening, when it was Tackaberrys turn to supervise the evening prep in the study hall, Beckett and a fellow student orchestrated a concert of The Singular Sing-Song Singers. Having distributed a song-list beforehand, on a signal from Beckett the assembly spontaneously burst into a series of songs. Tackaberry, spotting Beckett as the ringleader, descended on him and began to rain blows on his head with his fists. Beckett put up his guard until the beating stopped and then retorted: Why dont you hit someone your own size! The effect was devastating: Tackaberry walked back to his dais, put his head in his hands and started to weep. To think Ive come to this, he moaned, a convenient piss-pot for the whole school! (Knowlson 44-5). Along with his aloofness and sense of superiority, there was a streak of aggression and even cruelty in the younger Beckett that occasionally finds expression in his writing, especially in early works such as Dream and Murphy.

Russell Smith: Childhood and Portora

Though he often said his time at Portora was the last period of happiness for years to come, Beckett retained no affection for the school. Though one schoolmate, Geoffrey Thompson, became a lifelong friend, Beckett dropped all ties with the school, and later overtures for recognition were ignored. Eoin OBriens meticulous documentation of Becketts Irish background is forced to concede that there are few references in Samuel Becketts writings to the institutes in which he received his education (OBrien 111). Indeed the principal literary legacy of Portora seems to have been a handful of names; G.T. Bor became surgeon Bor in A Case in a Thousand; E.P. Mahood lent his name to the unfortunate pupil in The Unnamable, while both Mercier and Camier drew their names from Old Portorans. What Beckett seems to have retained from Portora (whether or not he had it before) is self-discipline, physical toughness, self-reliance, and a manly code of truth-telling, trustworthiness and fair play (Cronin 40). What he did not retain, as his brother Frank did and as his mother would have wished, was religious faith: My mother and brother got no value from their religion when they died, Beckett later commented. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old school tie (Driver 244). The legacy of Portora, though short on detail, coalesces in two important themes in Becketts work: a hatred of mindless educational methods based on coercion, and a rejection of the conventional values they uphold. According to D.B. McNeill, a contemporary of Becketts, the boys learnt large slabs of Latin by Ovid, Cicero and Virgil by heart, mainly taken from Kennedys Latin Primer, the book favoured by the then headmaster E.G. Seale (Green). And out it all pours unchanged, says the Unnamable, I have only to belch to be sure of hearing them, the same old sour teachings I cant change a tittle of. A parrot, thats what theyre up against (Trilogy 338). An especially important theme is that of the pensum, a piece of schoolwork imposed as a punishment (OED): if I have a pensum to perform it is because I could not say my lesson, and when I have finished my pensum I shall still have my lesson to say, before I have the right to stay quiet in my corner (Trilogy 313). The disreputable behaviour of the insubordinate son and pupil who insists on thinking and acting for himself becomes a central figure in some of Becketts most memorable writing (see for instance Trilogy 25). One should not expect, therefore, to find Molloys name among the lists of Old Portorans; the danger, as Beckett wrote in his first piece of literary criticism, is in the neatness of identifications (Disjecta 19). It is rather in the diffuse resonances, the ghostly after-images and pointed lacunae, not the details, that the contours of Becketts childhood and schooldays are to be discerned.

Works Cited
Ackerley, C.J. and S.E. Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 2004. Bair, Deirdre. [1978] Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Revised edition. London: Vintage, 1990. 9

Beckett in Context Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder, 1983. . The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. . Nohow On: Company; Ill Seen Ill Said; Worstward Ho. New York: Grove, 1996. . Trilogy: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable. London: Calder, 1994. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: Flamingo, 1997. Driver, Tom, Beckett by the Madeleine, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 217-223. Dukes, Gerry. Samuel Beckett. London: Penguin, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. Negation. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin, 1991. 435-42. Gordon, Lois. The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Green, Frances. Email correspondence with Anthony Uhlmann concerning reminiscences of D.B. McNeill, April-May 2002. Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. , and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. OBrien, Eoin. The Beckett Country: Samuel Becketts Ireland. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986. Peterkin, Tom. Sam Becketts Schooldays. The Telegraph (UK), 13 April 2006. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1515563/Sam-Becketts- schooldays.html> Accessed 13 September 2011. Portora Royal School. Portora Royal SchoolHistory. <http://www.portoraroyal.co.uk/?tabindex=7&tabid=4443> Accessed 13 September 2011. Reid, Alec. The Reluctant Prizeman. Arts 29 (1969): 64. Robertson, David. Sams Schooldays. The Irish Times, 22 April 2006. <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2006/0422/114490 8542147.html> Accessed 13 September 2011.

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