Beckett in wartime

sir – How pleasing to learn about the recordings of Samuel Beckett, which Professor James Knowlson has made available at the University of Reading (Arts, January 3). They will be invaluable for broadening our understanding of Beckett, something to which Professor Knowlson’s outstanding scholarship has contributed for many years.

This is the centenary of the year in which Beckett was admitted to Trinity College Dublin – an event we will be commemorating in Trinity’s French department. We are particularly mindful of Beckett’s unhesitating dedication to France with war on the horizon. As he wrote to his friend Tom Mcgreevy on April 18 1939: “If there is a war, as I fear there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country.”

If the impact of the Second World War on his work is now well established, it is his dedication to France, both through his role in the Resistance and at the Irish Hospital in the “Capital of the Ruins”, St-lô, which bears particular testimony to Beckett’s humanity and courage. If Ireland was politically neutral, Beckett was not.

But we might also remember his close friend and literary collaborator, Alfred Péron, who came to Trinity on the exchange programme with the École normale supérieure, which the department still enjoys. It was Péron who recruited Beckett into the Resistance network, Gloria. Imprisoned in Mauthausen concentration camp, he died shortly after his release on May 1 1945. Such was the horror of war experienced so personally by Beckett.

Dr Sarah Alyn Stacey Trinity College Dublin

sir – My father, Reggie Rowan, who attended Portora Royal School (Letters, January 5) in the 1890s, 30 years before Beckett, would tell how another famous alumnus was erased from the school honours board in disgrace. His name was Oscar Wilde.

I believe it was restored later. Ann Willmott

Market Harborough, Leicestershire