When Samuel Beckett wrote for Trinity News

In 1956, Samuel Beckett was at the height of his powers and on the cusp of worldwide notoriety. The last of his trilogy of novels, L'Innommable (The Unnamable), was published in 1953 and En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) premiered in Paris in the same year. His reputation grew in later years as his works were translated into English from the original French, yet scholars generally agree that the prolific output from this post-war decade marked the summit of Beckett's literary achievement.

Trinity News, describing Beckett as the "most well known of the Trinity Graduates to-day […] from America to Japan", was three years old at the time. The newspaper was a six-page weekly and covered sporting events in College, profiled staff and students, advertised local businesses, reviewed student poetry, and reported on the biggest stories on campus. Some headlines will be familiar to current readers of Trinity News, such as "Colours Match Lost", and "Round the Societies", however others recall more adventurous days. A front page story titled "Vengeance is ours: Success to Night Raiders" from 1956, for example, recalls a "skilfully planned and skilfully executed" raid on Queen's University Belfast, where four trophies were removed from the university's Council Room. The raid was conducted in retaliation over similar thefts in the rooms of the Hist and Phil societies made the previous year.

A speculative request

The editorial team during this time was made up of a Chairperson, Assistant Chairperson and three editors. One of those editors was the then Features editor Danae Stanford (now Danae O’Regan), who graduated from Trinity in French and German. In advance of the aforementioned edition featuring the raid on Belfast on the front page, O’Regan had written to Samuel Beckett in the hope that he might produce something for the young newspaper of his alma mater.

Speaking to Trinity News, O’Regan explains that she considered the request speculative as Beckett’s stature was international, even then. And although Beckett may have had a brilliant undergraduate career in Modern Languages and earned colours playing cricket for College, it is likely that his memories of teaching in Trinity were less fond: After graduating, Beckett worked briefly as a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, and then in Trinity. However, he soon left academia entirely after what he called a “grotesque comedy of lecturing”. It was to O’Regan’s surprise, then, when “Beckett sent back his text immediately.” Although by her own admittance, “we had no idea then that he would become as big as he did”, O’Regan was nonetheless delighted to publish work by a writer who presumably had the pick of any number of literary journals and presses.

The text in question is From an Abandoned Work, one of Beckett's lesser studied pieces of short fiction. The elusive narrative follows the recollections of an old man over the course of three days. There are some semi-autobiographical elements, such as: "Fortunately, my father died when I was a boy, otherwise I would have been a professor, he had set his heart on it." And the familiar Beckettian themes of interior doubt, the unchanging mundanity of daily routine, and the futility of a search for meaning or direction, are all met with a stoic resolution that they must be faced:

“Nor will I go out of my way to avoid such things when avoidable. No, I simply will not go out of my way, though I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.”

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