Brendan Behan

Irish playwright, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist.

• Born: February 9, 1923
• Place of birth: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: March 20, 1964
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Biography

Brendan Behan emerged as a significant Irish author and playwright during the 1950s. One of seven children, he was born Brendan Francis Aidan Behan in Dublin in 1923, the son of Kathleen Kearney and Stephen Behan. Stephen was deeply committed to Irish nationalism and had been imprisoned in Kilmainhain Prison for his actions during the Irish Civil War, and Kathleen was consistently outspoken in her support of Irish independence. Following in his parents' footsteps, Brendan enrolled in the Irish nationalist youth group Fianna Éireann at the age of seven and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) at the age of fourteen.

Behan’s formal education was slight, consisting of six years with the School of the French Sisters of Charity and three with the Christian Brothers. His parents enhanced this schooling by continually reading to all of their children. Behan’s education was completed by his apprenticeship to the house-painting business, but his work in that trade was interrupted because of his IRA activities and subsequent imprisonment. Arrested in 1939 at the age of sixteen for carrying the makings of a homemade bomb, Behan served a three-year term in an English reform school. Then in 1942 he was arrested again for firing at police officers while they pursued three IRA officers. Behan was sentenced to fourteen years in an Irish prison but served only a portion of the time before being released in 1946 under a general amnesty from the government.

Prison was to become the impetus for Behan’s literary career. With the time and resources to refine his knowledge of Irish, Behan worked on several poems there. The genius of these twelve lyric poems was recognized by their inclusion in a volume of modern Irish poetry. Prison also provided Behan with the material for his critically acclaimed autobiography Borstal Boy (1958), as well as the characters and plot for his stage play The Quare Fellow (1954), originally written in Irish and titled Casadh Súgáin Eile (The twisting of another rope).

After being released from imprisonment a second time, Behan painted houses, served an additional four-month sentence for falsifying his identity and reentering England to help an Irish prisoner escape, joined the Irish Press Association as a freelance journalist (he wrote a number of distinguished columns for the Irish Press), and worked as a broadcaster for Ireland’s national radio. During this time, Behan wrote Moving Out and A Garden Party, two short plays that aired on the radio in 1952. A third radio play, The Big House, was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) several years later and aired in 1957. The three plays were subsequently staged at the Pike Theatre Club in 1958 in a single production, the first two under the combined title The New House.

It is with The Quare Fellow and An Giall (1958) / The Hostage (1958, a revised translation of An Giall), however, that Behan’s reputation as a dramatist lies. In its original Irish version, The Quare Fellow was a one-act play that required considerable development; similarly, An Giall needed both translation and expansion from its one-act form. Behan provided Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop with a script that he, Littlewood, and her cast rewrote as The Hostage. The Quare Fellow was first produced at Dublin’s Pike Theatre in 1954; An Giall at An Damer in Dublin on June 16, 1958; and The Hostage in London at the Theatre Royal on October 14, 1958. Critical reaction to the plays was favorable, and The Hostage was chosen to represent Great Britain at the 1959 Théâtre des Nations festival in Paris. Another stage play, Richard’s Cork Leg, remained incomplete during Behan’s life, largely because of his worsening alcoholism. It was completed by Alan Simpson, Behan’s director from the Pike Theatre, and opened in the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 1972.

Drinking was an increasingly serious problem for Behan from 1959 until his death five years later. Diabetic comas and alcoholic seizures put him into the hospital time and time again. Unable to control his alcoholism, he began tape-recording his memories for Rae Jeffs to edit. Those recordings were subsequently published as Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), Behan’s sequel to Borstal Boy; Brendan Behan’s Island (1962), his descriptions of Ireland; and Brendan Behan’s New York (1964), reminiscences of poets, actors, dramatists, and fiction writers whom he had met in New York. Brendan Behan died of a degenerated liver on March 20, 1964. He was survived by his wife, painter Beatrice ffrench-Salkeld, and their infant daughter, Blanaid Behan.

Behan’s stage productions are essentially comic. Among an unlikely mixture of characters, puns and jokes abound, and music-hall songs are plentiful. The comic convention of disguise figures prominently in The Hostage and Richard’s Cork Leg. All these comic touches provide a sharp counterpoint to Behan’s serious plots: the hanging of a condemned man, the attempt to exchange a British soldier’s life for that of an Irish boy about to be executed, and the hunting of a Bolshevik by Fascists. Behan’s juxtaposition of the serious and comic leads to his overall themes of the dignity of the individual, the accidental nature of life and death, and the transfiguration of the tragic by the comic. Neither obvious nor explicit, these themes pervade Behan’s stage productions, lending their loosely constructed plots a certain unity.

The plot development of Behan’s stage plays has often been criticized, as has his lack of in-depth characterization in The Hostage and Richard’s Cork Leg. Defending his loose, at times rambling, plots and shadowy characters, some critics place Behan among the absurdists, noting that Behan's dramas, like those of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, reflect characters of a formless universe. Critical debate never affected the public’s reaction to his work; The Quare Fellow, An Giall, and The Hostage met with huge acclaim upon their performances in Dublin and London. Indeed, the man himself captivated the public. Playwright, journalist, and revolutionary, Brendan Behan fascinated those he met, holding them spellbound with his talk and songs.

Author Works

Drama:

Gretna Green, pr. 1947

Casadh Súgáin Eile, wr. 1946 (The Quare Fellow, translation and revision, pr. 1954, pb. 1956)

The Big House, pr. 1957 (radio play), pr. 1958 (staged)

The New House, pr. 1958 (combined radio plays Moving Out and The Garden Party)

An Giall, pr. 1958 (The Hostage, translation and revision, pr., pb. 1958)

Richard’s Cork Leg, pr. 1972 (begun 1960, completed posthumously by Alan Simpson)

The Complete Plays, pb. 1978

Long Fiction:

Emmet Street, 1953 (serialized; pb. as The Scarperer, 1964)

The Dubbalin Man, 1954–56 (serialized; pb. 1997)

Short Fiction:

After the Wake: Twenty-One Prose Works Including Previously Unpublished Material, 1981 (Peter Fallon, editor)

Radio Plays:

A Garden Party, 1952

Moving Out, 1952

Nonfiction:

Borstal Boy, 1958

Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketchbook, 1962

Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1963

Brendan Behan’s New York, 1964

Confessions of an Irish Rebel, 1965

The Letters of Brendan Behan, 1992 (E. K. Mikhail, editor)

Miscellaneous:

Poems and Stories, 1978 (Denis Cotter, editor

Poems and a Play in Irish, 1981 (includes the play An Giall)

Bibliography

Behan, Brian. The Brothers Behan. With Aubrey Dillon-Malone, Ashfield Press, 1998. The brother of Brendan Behan writes of their lives and his brother’s work.

Behan, Kathleen. Mother of All the Behans: The Story of Kathleen Behan as Told to Brian Behan. Hutchinson, 1984. The mother of the dramatist and revolutionary describes her life and her family.

Brannigan, John. Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer. Four Courts Press, 2002. Offers a reassessment of Behan’s work, presenting his writings as complex representations of the construction and negotiation of identity and culture.

De Búrca, Séamus. Brendan Behan: A Memoir. 1971. P. J. Bourke, 1985. A memoir-style biography of the famous dramatist, covering his life and works.

Kearney, Colbert. The Writings of Brendan Behan. St. Martin’s Press, 1977. An overview of Behan’s life and works, depicting the playwright primarily as an iconoclast who pushed broad-mindedness to its limits, both in the theater and in his personal activities.

Mikhail, E. H., editor. Brendan Behan, Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols., Barnes & Noble Books, 1982. A collection of extracts from published memoirs and interviews given by those who knew Behan. Contains fifty-one items in volume 1 and fifty-five in volume 2. Mikhail’s introduction insightfully compares Behan and Oscar Wilde.

O’Connor, Ulick. Brendan. 1970. Prentice-Hall, 1971. A judicious biographical and critical study that effectively captures not only Behan’s charm and wit as a raconteur and celebrity but also the self-destructiveness and pain of his later life. Offers photographs, notes, and a bibliography.

O’Sullivan, Michael. Brendan Behan: A Life. Blackwater Press, 1997. A compelling, definitive biography that draws on a major collection of Behan’s prison correspondence and documents, as well as interviews with family members, friends, fellow writers, and Behan’s editors and producers. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Witoszek, Walentyna. “The Funeral Comedy of Brendan Behan.” Études irlandaises, vol. 11, no. 1, 1986, pp. 83–91. Discusses the puzzling presence of laughter in Behan’s writings in which execution is imminent. Though Death is the “central character” in all Behan’s plays, there is also an orgiastic atmosphere of carnival madness, which is analyzed in terms of ritual, the Irish image of the laughing death, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque.