In 1969 Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize ‘for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’.
His work is characterised by pessimism and brilliant humour. Beckett was born in 1906. He lived at Cooldrinagh (right), Kerrymount, Avenue, Foxrock and mainly lived there until his ultimate departure from Ireland in the 1930s.
Although Beckett left Ireland in the 1930s he drew huge inspiration from the area in which he grew up. It continuously featured it in his writings. Indeed there is no other writer whose works are more associated with the area covered by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. Beckett has covered the whole
geographical spread of the county. Eoin O’Brien, in his book The Beckett Country wrote that the area between the mountains and the sea was fundamental to his early novels. While it faded in the middle years it did not quite disappear. Later in life Beckett wrote that “the old haunts were never more present” and “I walk those backroads with closed eyes.”
Beckett’s best-known work is Waiting for Godot. Although he was careful not to pinpoint a location for the play the bleak landscape he encountered on his walks in the Dublin mountains must have been in his mind. According to O’Brien the mood of Waiting for Godot is palpable on the mountains in certain weather.
Another significant landmark for Beckett was Dún Laoghaire’s East Pier. He writes in Krapp’s Last Tape of taking a walk on the East Pier on the spring equinox. At the end of the pier the lighthouse ‘flings its brilliant beam of light across the bay’. During this evening his future literary career was revealed to him. Beckett had been struggling to establish himself as a writer.
On the East Pier came the revelation that he would use himself as his own subject;
Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly saw the whole thing. The vision at last…the fire that set me alight…
“...great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light
of the lighthouse and the wind gauge spinning like a propeller,
clear to me at last that the dark I have always
struggled to keep under is in reality my most…”
Tully church was a favourite place of Beckett and in Molloy, Moran chose it to be his final resting place, ‘It is here that I have my plot in perpetuity. As long as the earth endures that spot is mine, in theory. Sometimes I went and looked at my grave. The stone was up already (right top).’
Malone Dies reaches its macabre climax when a party of lunatics take a boat trip to Dalkey Island.
The events in All That Fall take place on the day of a race meeting in Leopardstown racecourse with much of the action taking place in Foxrock train station (known as Boghill station in the book) and it even features the station-master who was personally known to Beckett.
Cooldrinagh constantly appears in his work and serves as the model for Moran’s House in Molloy and Mr. Knott’s house in Watt. In another book Boss Croker’s gallops features;
Beckett tramped the hills, fields and lanes of the Dublin Mountains with his father. They would climb the Glencullen road;
The first thing they had to do of course when they got to the top was to admire the view, with special reference to Dún Laoghaire, framed to perfection in the shoulders of Three Rock and Kilmashogue, the long arms of the harbour like an entreaty in the blue sea.
On another occasion Beckett wrote of looking from the mountains to the sea:
I saw the beacons, four in all, including a lightship. I knew them well. It was evening, I was with my father on a height, he held my hand. I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things. He also taught
me the names of the mountains.
The quarries at Glencullen and Barnacullia are remembered in the musical clink of the hammers of the stone. In First Love he writes:
I saw the mountain, impassable, cavernous, secret, where from morning to night I’d hear nothing but the wind, the curlews, the clink like distant silver of the stone-cutters’hammers. I’d come out in the daytime to the heather and gorse, all warmth and scent,
and watch at night the distant city lights, if I chose, and the other lights, the lighthouses and lightships my father had named for me, when I was small, and whose names I could find again, in my memory, if I chose, the I knew.
“Nowhere in particular on the way form A to Z.
Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road.
The dear old back road.
Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road
in lieu of nowhere in particular…
Head sunk totting up the tally on the verge of the ditch.
Foothills to left. Croker’s field ahead.”
Samuel Beckett